5/3/2023 0 Comments Flocks of sparrows![]() They are able to find adequate supplies of food year-round. One way to look at migration is to consider the distances traveled. The term migration describes periodic, large-scale movements of populations of animals. As winter approaches and the availability of insects and other food drops, the birds move south again. Escaping the cold is a motivating factor but many species, including hummingbirds, can withstand freezing temperatures as long as an adequate supply of food is available. Here’s more about how migration evolved.īirds that nest in the Northern Hemisphere tend to migrate northward in the spring to take advantage of burgeoning insect populations, budding plants and an abundance of nesting locations. The two primary resources being sought are food and nesting locations. Why do birds migrate?īirds migrate to move from areas of low or decreasing resources to areas of high or increasing resources. Of the more than 650 species of North American breeding birds, more than half are migratory. But geese are far from our only migratory birds. But there aren’t as many as there were on that day when they covered the ground, lined the branches of the bushes and trees in the yard and crowded the feeders outside the dining room window.Geese winging their way south in wrinkled V-shaped flocks is perhaps the classic picture of migration-the annual, large-scale movement of birds between their breeding (summer) homes and their nonbreeding (winter) grounds. There are house sparrows on the ground and in the bushes and trees around the feeders. ![]() There are house sparrows on my feeders now, both the feeder outside the dining room window and the feeder outside my study window. There are house sparrows at my bird feeders every day except when the weather is particularly bad, when there is a strong wind and heavy rains or snow. But what if the birds are named sparrow but are not true sparrows, like the birds that made such a spectacle in my yard one unforgettable day? A gathering of sparrows is a host of sparrows according to the terminology of birders. The house sparrow is a bird of a family of a kind of finches that are not found in America, and that introduces another naming conundrum. Its legs and neck are shorter and it looks as if has no neck, that its head is on its shoulders. Look carefully at a house sparrow and another sparrow on your bird feeder and the house sparrow is fatter. It’s slight, but the difference is clear. There’s a visible difference between the house sparrows and American sparrows. In England and Europe, to distinguish between the house sparrow and American sparrows the house sparrow is called an old world sparrow. It’s a bird of a family of finches, not American finches but birds that don’t occur in North America. The house sparrow is not of the same family as sparrows of North America: song sparrow, chipping sparrow, vesper sparrow, white-throated and white-crowned and many more. I didn’t consider the name sparrow but there has been disagreement over that name also. When the Naming Committee of the American Ornithologists Union prescribed house sparrow as the correct name I accepted that and started calling the bird by that name. English sparrow was the name I learned when I was a boy. In the first edition of Roger Rory’s book of A field Guide to the Birds of North America, published in 1934, Roger Rory Peterson listed both names calling it house or English sparrow. When introduced to America the house sparrow was called English sparrow. Now the house sparrow is one of the most common birds of North America. They accepted their new homes readily, raised multiple broods, two, three, four in the spring and summer and spread rapidly across the continent. There were many other introductions in other cities. They were first introduced to America in 1851 in Brooklyn. They’re birds of Great Britain and Europe. House sparrows, though one of the most common birds of North American, are not native. There was a black-capped chickadee, a tufted titmouse and a few goldfinches. There were other birds also, flying in and out to the feeder. I’d seen flocks of house sparrows before but I’d never seen a flock as big as this. I read in Birds of America that house sparrows gather in immense flocks. They lined every branch of the bush near the window. They covered the ground, as numerous as dead leaves in the fall. I looked out the dining room window one morning and was astounded at the sparrows house sparrows.
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