White-throated
Sparrow, Zonotrichia albicollis
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![]() The White-throated Sparrow, the eastern cousin of our regular winterers the White-crowned and Golden-crowned Sparrows, is found in small numbers every winter in the SF Bay Area, but I got these, my first pictures of the species, on the East Coast. The breeding-plumaged bird shown above and below was singing this species's famously melodic "Sam Peabody" song in the underbrush alongside the main trail at Settlement Quarry in July 2010 on Deer Isle, Maine, and after stalking him for a while I was finally lucky enough to have him pose for me. The eye-stripes and yellow marks are larger and brighter in breeding plumage than they are in the winter birds shown further down the page. |
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![]() I came upon the bird shown above and below, in non-breeding plumage, foraging with a flock of Golden-crowned Sparrows at the Mora Road entrance to Rancho San Antonio in Los Altos just south of Palo Alto in December 2011. |
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![]() Below is another white-striped wintering adult, also photographed in the winter of 2011-12, this one at the Brussels sprout dump at Cascade Ranch on the San Mateo County coast, the same place where earlier the same winter I photographed a first-cycle bird of the same species, shown at the bottom of this page. |
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![]() White-throated Sparrows come in two color morphs: white-striped, as above, and tan-striped, below, a bird photographed, also in the winter of 2011-12, at the Community Farm on the Stanford campus. |
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![]() The streaky breast identifies this as a first-winter bird. All first-cycle White-throated Sparrows have tan eyebrow stripes (supercilia); some of these keep them and join the tan-striped morph as adults, while others develop white stripes at maturation; the two morphs are illustrated above on this page. I photographed this bird as well at the white-striped adult seen up the page at the famous Brussels sprout dump at Cascade Ranch on the San Mateo County coast in the winter of 2011-12. |