Bird Profile

White-throated Sparrow

Two birds under your feeder look like different species, and both are White-throated Sparrows. The reason is one of the odder mating systems in North American birds.

The White-throated Sparrow (Zonotrichia albicollis) is a large, round, striped-headed sparrow about 6.5 inches (17 cm) long, with a sharply defined white throat and a yellow spot between the eye and the bill. Across the eastern half of the continent it is one of the standard winter feeder birds, scratching in leaf litter below the seed.

It is also a genuinely strange bird. Adults come in two permanent forms, white-striped and tan-striped, and they pair up almost exclusively with the other form, which gives the species something close to four functional mating categories rather than two.

This profile covers identification and the White-crowned Sparrow problem, the morphs and what they mean, the whistled song, the food and ground feeding setup that works, nesting in the boreal forest, and how the population is doing.

How to identify a White-throated Sparrow#

Throat: a clean white patch, sharply outlined against a gray breast. It is the field mark the bird is named for and it is visible at a distance.

Face: a yellow spot between the eye and the bill (the lores). On dull birds it can be faint, but it is present on almost all of them and no similar sparrow has it.

Crown: striped, either black and white or brown and tan (see below).

Body: gray-brown above with rusty wings and two thin white wingbars, plain grayish below on white-striped birds and faintly streaked on tan-striped ones. The bill is dark gray, the tail long.

Confusion species. The White-crowned Sparrow is the main one: no white throat patch, no yellow lores, a pink or orange bill, and a distinctly upright, long-necked posture. Immature White-crowneds have brown-and-buff crown stripes and get called White-throateds constantly. Check the throat and bill color. Song Sparrows are streaked below and lack any crown stripes at all.

The two morphs, and why they matter#

Adult White-throated Sparrows come in two versions that stay fixed for life:

Both morphs occur in both sexes, in roughly equal numbers. The single most common error at a feeder is calling the white-striped bird a male and the tan-striped bird a female. They are not.

The differences are carried on a large rearranged section of one chromosome, inherited as a single block, which is why the plumage and the behavior travel together instead of being shuffled independently. White-striped birds carry the rearranged version; tan-striped birds do not.

The whistled song#

The song is a thin, pure, slightly quavering whistle: one or two long introductory notes, then a series of three-note phrases. Canadians hear Oh sweet Canada Canada Canada; Americans usually learn it as Old Sam Peabody Peabody Peabody. Either way it is one of the easiest bird songs to recognize and to imitate.

Birds sing on migration and on the wintering grounds, not only on territory, which is why a February morning in Tennessee can sound like a Quebec bog.

Researchers working from decades of amateur and archival recordings have tracked a change in the ending of the song spreading west to east across Canada, with birds increasingly finishing on two-note phrases rather than three. It is one of the best-documented cases of a song variant sweeping across a continent, and it is still audible in the differences between individual birds in a winter flock.

When and where you will see them#

White-throated Sparrows breed across the boreal forest of Canada and into the northern Great Lakes states and New England, favoring clearings, regenerating burns, bog edges and young second growth.

In fall they pour south, mostly at night, arriving in the eastern and southern US from late September through early November. They winter in brushy woodland edges, hedgerows, thickets and suburban yards, and head north again in April and early May. Small numbers winter along the Pacific coast, where they are a good find.

What they eat and the feeder setup#

Diet shifts hard by season: mostly insects in the breeding season, mostly seeds and fruit the rest of the year, including ragweed, smartweed, sedges, sumac, blackberry, grape and dogwood.

At feeders they are ground birds. Provide:

• White proso millet, the top draw, on a low tray or scattered thinly under the feeders.
• Black oil sunflower and sunflower hearts, taken from the ground under a hanging feeder.
• Cracked corn in small amounts in cold weather.

Use a ground feeder or catch tray or a low platform feeder rather than a tube. Position it within about 10 feet (3 m) of a hedge, brush pile or shrub, because these birds will not feed far from cover for long.

If you are buying seed for this flock, millet content is the number that matters, and the filler seeds in cheap mixes are not a substitute: see bird seed mixes. The rest of the ground-feeding crowd is covered in how to attract juncos.

Behavior worth knowing#

Winter flocks are loose, ten to thirty birds, and usually mixed with Dark-eyed Juncos, Song Sparrows and cardinals. Within the flock there is a clear dominance order, and you will see the same individuals displacing others from the same corner of the tray day after day.

They are creatures of routine. A flock that finds a tray will work the same route through a yard at the same times, and they are among the easiest feeder birds to predict.

They flush into cover at any disturbance and come back within a minute, giving a sharp pink call and a thin lisping seet in flight. In cold weather they feed heavily at first light and again in the last half hour before dark, which is worth knowing if you top up the tray in the middle of the day: see winter bird feeding for the timing argument.

Nesting#

Nesting happens well north of most feeder watchers. Nests sit on the ground or just above it, tucked under a shrub, a fern or the edge of a mossy hummock in a forest clearing, made of grass, pine needles, twigs and rootlets and lined with fine grass and deer hair.

Clutches are four to six pale blue or greenish eggs marked with brown. Incubation runs about 12 days and the young leave the nest around 8 to 9 days later, again before they can fly. Pairs usually raise one brood, occasionally two.

Where White-throated Sparrows meet Dark-eyed Juncos in the boreal forest, the two occasionally hybridize, producing an odd gray sparrow with a hint of crown striping that turns up at feeders once in a great while.

Population and conservation#

The White-throated Sparrow remains one of the most abundant birds of the North American boreal forest, with a population in the tens of millions. Long-term survey data has nonetheless shown a substantial decline over recent decades, in line with a broader pattern among boreal-breeding songbirds.

The pressures are mostly far from your yard: forestry practices that shorten the young-growth stage these birds need, and habitat change across a huge northern range. The parts you can influence are collisions during migration, cats, and whether your yard offers real cover in winter.

A setup for winter sparrow flocks#

• A low tray of white millet, refilled with only what the flock clears in a day.
• Sited within 10 feet (3 m) of a hedge or brush pile, never in the open lawn.
• Leaves left under the shrubs so the birds have litter to scratch through.
• Windows near the feeding area treated on the outside before fall migration.
• Watch the crowns in a flock: counting white-striped against tan-striped birds is the easiest piece of real fieldwork you can do from a kitchen window.