Back for the Holidays: The White-throated Sparrow

Photo: White-throated Sparrow, Ashrith Kandula/Audubon Photography Awards

Summer Delehanty

“Oh-sweet-Canada-Canada” or “Old-Sam-Peabody-Peabody” – no matter which phrase you associate with the song of the White-throated Sparrow, northern Virginia residents can expect to hear it throughout the coming months as these little birds sing of their return from breeding grounds in Canada. As winter encroaches, White-throated Sparrows fly south into the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, and Southeast of the United States, with some also staying in coastal California. Although they are present year-round in the Northeast, that region’s summer residents head south and are replaced by northern populations.

White-throated Sparrow, Charles Carlow/Audubon Photography Awards

While most birds only sing during the breeding season, relying on chirps and other short calls to communicate the rest of the year, White-throated Sparrows sing year-round, at any time of day. Their whistled song is roughly four seconds long with even notes that can either rise or fall in pitch. Though commonly ending in three syllables, a different two-syllable “dialect” first appeared in British Columbia in 2002. See How a White-Throated Sparrow's New Tune Went Viral. The Rocky Mountains were initially predicted to confine this dialect to the West Coast. However, miraculously, the song had traveled clear to Quebec in less than 20 years, an unusually quick uptake of a new singing pattern for a bird. Biologists used geolocators to track the wintering behavior of different White-throated Sparrows, finding that an overlap in Western and Eastern populations in Texas allowed the song to spread to impressionable baby sparrows of the East. Any doublet-ending singers in Virginia can be traced back to this first variation in British Columbia. 

Though both sexes of White-throated Sparrow sing, some individuals are more likely to sing than others, and it depends on the color of their eyebrow stripe. In fact, other behavioral differences are observed not only between sexes, but between individuals with different color stripes. The classification is subtle: all White-throated Sparrows sport the same general appearance, with the tell-tale white throat, yellow lores, and black-and-pale facial markings. The difference is in the color of the pale stripes on the face. “White-striped” birds have white markings, the same color as their throat, while “tan-striped” birds are noticeably drabber. White-striped males are more aggressive and sing the most, while tan-striped females will rarely sing. Regardless of sex, tan-striped individuals are more likely to engage in parental care of their young. Interestingly, White-throated Sparrow individuals almost always mate with a bird of the opposite color morph. Their courtship patterns are complicated, with both types of males preferring white-striped females, and both types of females preferring tan-striped males. This mismatched pairing allows both stripe types to persist.

White-throated Sparrow, Dawn Phillips/Audubon Photography Awards

With such interesting songs and color variations, it’s no wonder that White-throated Sparrows are a fan-favorite, declared “one of the continent's best-studied and most familiar songbirds” by Cornell’s Birds of the World. Even if you’ve never seen one, they shouldn’t be hard to find. White-throated Sparrows congregate in most woods and brushy areas, including neighborhoods and tree-lined sidewalks. When in flocks, like other sparrows, they will often emit high-pitched “seep” calls, though their bold black-and-white facial patterns are hard to mistake for anything else. These birds aren’t picky with their friends; pay attention to the flocks they congregate in and you may also find a Song Sparrow, Swamp Sparrow, Carolina Wren or other small passerine. 

Though widespread and abundant, White-throated Sparrows are especially vulnerable to window collisions as they migrate through urban and suburban areas. This species has been dubbed a "super-collider," with Chicago Bird Collision Monitors recording over 4,000 individuals in a 5-year period, nearly two times as many birds as the second most common species. Because they migrate at night and rely on stars to navigate, light pollution in cities can cause them to become disoriented. It’s been suggested that their tendency to call to one another while migrating actually causes more collisions, as one confused White-throated Sparrow can lead others astray. 

Collisions don’t only happen with skyscrapers during peak migration. Studies on college campuses, like the University of Washington, have found collisions around mid-sized buildings year-round, with an uptick during winter months in that region. Reducing unnecessary light pollution at night, keeping shrubbery away from windows and treating large and reflective window facades with vinyl patterns are all effective ways to reduce collisions for birds like the White-throated Sparrow. 

In cold weather and dark evenings, this bird’s cheery song makes it a welcome winter resident in Virginia. Listen for their whistled tune this holiday season. By the time they’re heading back north, the canopy will be alive with spring birdsong again. 

Summer Delehanty is a product designer with a passion for birdwatching.

Migrants at Upton Hill Regional Park

Photo: Brown Thrasher, Will Stuart/Audubon Photography Awards

Greg Butcher

What is the most popular activity at Upton Hill Regional Park in Arlington? Is it the waterpark? The huge climbing apparatus? Mini-golf? Batting cages?

What few people know is that there is a lot of natural habitat at Upton Hill, and that habitat attracts a lot of migratory birds. In that sense, Upton Hill is a microcosm of northern Virginia – we have lots of people and lots of development, but we also have lots of birds, especially in spring and fall.

Northern Parula, Linda Steele/Audubon Photography Awards

For most people, warblers create the most excitement in spring. Roger Tory Peterson called them “the butterflies of the bird world” because they are small, colorful, and active! In most springs, Upton Hill hosts 30 or 31 species of warblers. If you count Yellow-rumped Warblers (that might spend the winter here), warbler migration has already begun. The next expected species is Palm Warbler, then Louisiana Waterthrush and Northern Parula, all possible in early April. Any of the 31 species can be expected during the first week of May.

Red-eyed Vireo, Greg Pasek/Audubon Photography Awards

Blue-headed Vireo, Doug DeNeve/Audubon Photography Awards

Other highlights of spring migration include vireos, thrushes, and flycatchers. Upton Hill features five species of vireos (including Red-eyed Vireos that stick around to breed), five species of thrushes (including Hermit that spends the winter and Wood that breeds nearby), and six species of flycatchers (all of which breed in our area). Eastern Phoebe is the earliest arrival, during the first week of March. Next is Blue-headed Vireo at the beginning of April. The latest and rarest of the group is Gray-cheeked Thrush that sneaks through in mid-May, heading for the boreal forest of Canada.

Baltimore Oriole, Mark Boyd/Audubon Photography Awards

There are a number of other special migrants to look for at Upton Hill: Baltimore Oriole, Scarlet Tanager, and Rose-breasted Grosbeak. And many birds that breed in our area are easiest to see from late April to late May when they first arrive and sing and display to set up territories and attract mates. Upton Hill has Blue-gray Gnatcatcher and Brown Thrasher as early arrivals. Red-eyed Vireo will arrive in late April and sing all summer long.

Brown Thrasher, Will Stuart/Audubon Photography Awards

Because of the great opportunities to see songbirds during migration, ASNV and Upton Hill Regional Park plan to co-host a birdwalk every weekend in April and May. Watch the listings on our website for more information.

To view a bar chart of the comings and goings of Upton Hill Regional Park, click here.

Birdathon 2021: When is Peak Landbird Migration in NoVA and DC?

Photo: Yellow-throated Warbler, Lorraine Minns/Audubon Photography Awards

Greg Butcher

Audubon Society of Northern Virginia sponsors a Birdathon every spring. We send out a bunch of teams whose goal is to see as many species as possible in a 24-hour period and to raise money for our programs.

Here are the 4 main tricks to seeing the maximum number of species in a 24-hour period:

Trick #1 is to get up before dawn and bird all day long (and into the night for owls). 

Trick #2 is to visit a wide variety of habitat types. 

Trick #3 is to find the best birders with good eyes, good ears and good knowledge of the local birds (especially their songs). 

Trick #4, especially in the Washington DC region, is to go at the peak of migration.

More and more information exists to help determine the peak of migration in any given place. There is a ton of information on eBird, the website maintained by Cornell Lab of Ornithology that records all birds encountered by eBirders every day at every birding spot in the world. The data are summarized in a variety of easy-to-understand formats, but I haven’t yet figured out the easiest way to study peak migration for species diversity using eBird.

However, in Northern Virginia, we have a golden gem of a resource that highlights anything you might want to know about spring migration of landbirds – it’s a website called MPNature. MPNature has a limitation that you might think minimizes its usefulness – it is focused on the birds (and plants) of one of the smallest and most suburban parks in Northern Virginia – Monticello Park. 

But Monticello Park has three advantages that make it a wonderful barometer of the state of landbird migration in Northern Virginia and Washington DC: 

1. It is an amazing magnet for birds, with 124 species.

2. Its spring birds have been meticulously documented since 2005 by Tom Albright and a host of other birders.

3. And, of course, it has an amazing website, beautifully and purposefully created by Bill Young, Ashley Bradford and their friends.

I should probably have written an article about the beauty of the website. Ten different photographers have contributed gorgeous stills and videos of the birds, the plants and views from within the park. But that’s a different article!

Under the “Daily Checklist” tab is a list for each day of April and May of all the birds that have been seen on that date between 2005 and 2018 divided into 4 groups: resident birds, migrants that averaged more than 2 individuals on that date, migrants that averaged between 1 and 2 individuals, and migrants that have been seen in the park on that date, but not every year.

If you are interested in a particular migratory species, there is another section of the website with photos and the earliest, latest and best dates to find that species in the park. The park is a woodland with a stream running through it, so you can’t learn much about waterbirds or grassland birds, but it does have information about 35 species of warblers!

But I had a single goal in mind – I wanted to know THE best date for spring migration in our area, so I reduced all of Tom Albright’s species-specific information to numbers, and here’s what I found out:

• The website’s report of expected species begins on April 1, and for the first 24 days in April, you can expect 4 common migrant species that average more than 2 individuals per day. In addition, you have the chance to see about 11 other less predictable migrants on any of those 24 days.

• Everything starts to pick up on April 25. All of a sudden, there are 7 common migrants and 14 additional possible species.

• The good news is that peak migration lasts for 15 days: May 1 through 15. On any one of those days, you can expect 17-21 common migrants with a possible total of 33-37 migratory species, plus up to 23 of the park’s resident species.

• The next week – May 16-22 – isn’t too bad, with 16 common migrants expected on the 16th, dropping to 11 on the 22nd and a possible total of 26-32 migratory species each day.

• After May 23, migration drops off sharply, with only 7 or 8 migratory species expected on May 30 or 31.

A few caveats: every day is different! The above numbers are averaged over 14 years, creating great uniformity, but migration depends on the weather. On a beautiful clear night with strong southerly wings, all the migrants might pass us by. Better conditions (for seeing a lot of migrants) are rainy nights with northerly winds that keep migrants from flying too far too fast. But the only way to find out if tomorrow is a great day to see migrants is to get outside and look for yourself.

If you want to see the most landbird migrants in Northern Virginia on a single outing, I suggest you plan to bird between May 1 and May 15, so if you participate in ASNV’s Birdathon, this would be the best time to choose your 24-hour count day. If you just want to see as many spring migrants as possible, you should go out on as many of these days as you can, because some species are early migrants and others are later – and I still have never seen all the expected species on a single day. (Maybe this year!)

Good luck and happy birding!