Chipping Sparrow, Spizella passerina
The adult shown above and below offered me these especially nice poses on a springtime walk with camera through the Beech Forest, just outside Provincetown on Cape Cod.
This bird, photographed in April in Arizona, had not quite completed its molt from non-breeding to breeding plumage; note the partly solid red but still partly brown-striped crown. Below is a wintering bird in non-breeding plumage in the San Francisco Bay Area in October.
The three non-breeding plumage birds above were in the same small over-wintering flock as the bird below, which appears fully-moulted to breeding plumage; both photos were taken in January in the San Francisco Bay Area, where wintering Chipping Sparrows are uncommon. Birds of this species are known to have an unusual and individually variable start-and-stop molt sequence in late winter.
