This week’s Bird of the Week, compliments of the Weminuche Audubon Society and Audubon Rockies, is the Brewer’s sparrow.
When you are trying to identify the individuals in a group of small birds moving from place to place on the ground, it doesn’t help to be looking for one that is described as lacking a field mark. That is the Brewer’s sparrow, a slim, long-tailed bird that is one of North America’s smallest sparrows.
One Brewer’s trait to notice is an unmarked, grayish underside, which narrows the field of identification choices. Brewer’s sparrows have a thin eyering, but this might be hard to see. Streaking on the crown can give its head a peaked look, and dark cheek patches are included in its description.
Unremarkable coloration serves this bird well in the muted gray-green colors of the sagebrush habitat where it is the most abundant bird during breeding season. The buzzy trilling songs of males are a signature of summer there. This is a bird so well adapted to arid environments that it can survive for weeks without drinking water. In summer it eats mostly small insects and spiders, adding more seeds in winter.
Brewer’s sparrows breed in areas dominated by sagebrush in western states and Canada. There are a few known exceptions of birds occurring in alpine habitat in Colorado and a separate subspecies that breeds at higher elevation lands of dwarf willow and birch shrubs in Canada. They spend the winter in desert grasslands of the southwestern United States and Mexico.
We may travel through sagebrush country and think it dry and lifeless, but more than 350 species of animals and plants thrive in this habitat, and some are found nowhere else. Sagebrush steppe is a fragile ecosystem where the wise management of livestock grazing and energy development, and the control of invasive, fire-prone plant species, are critical to the survival of the life it supports.
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