ML463727821
Contributor
Date
Location
- Age and sex
- Adult, Unknown sex - 1
- Sounds
- Song
- Playback
- Not specified
Media notes
Also a Black-tailed Prairie Dog starts calling at 0:19.
Observation details
Lifer! It may be a bit of a stretch to call this part of the delta hotspot since it was out in the open prairie south of the parking lot. It was singing from the bush in the photograph for at least five minutes before flying off in a low, fairly direct flight. Like most N. American sparrows, it was brown and very streaky with a conical but not impressively stout beak. It's complete eye-ring was the most prominent facial feature, followed by it's dark, long, curling moustachial stripe, which may be the most mustache-looking moustachial I've ever seen on any sparrow. The tail maintained its visible notch in all the photos I took of it. I'll describe its song as having three parts although it could be split up further. The intro was to pairs of short, clear-toned, even-rhythmed, repeated whistles with the first two being a little quiet, moderately low in pitch, and sometimes kept to a single note instead of a pair. The second two were very close to a perfect fourth higher in pitch, louder, and sometimes came as a trio of notes. The middle of the song was a rapid series of seven equally clear-toned, but less musical, much shorter, and slightly higher-pitched notes. These were probably rapidly sliding notes, but they passed too quickly and are too faint to really see well on the spectrogram, despite being plenty loud. This part bore some resemblance to a Dark-eyed Junco song, although I think they tend to be even higher-pitched. The last part of the song had two slower series of upsliding "wap" notes with each series consisting of three or four notes and each being generally softer than the middle part, and different in general pitch to my ear (despite each individual note sliding pretty far) from each other, but not in a consistent pattern. In my recording, the first iteration of the song has each of the last two series being sung at lower pitches than the series they followed, but in the second iteration the last series is higher than the second-to-last. I found this bird in a way I never have before. It came as a completely unsuspected gift from the Merlin app's Sound ID! I've used Merlin many times before to confirm that a bird I'm hearing is what I think it is. I had even just done so a little over an hour before with the Gray Catbird. What was different about this is I didn't have the slightest suspicion there was a new-to-me bird singing nearby. Honestly, I can't even think specifically why I decided to take a recording at all. I heard meadowlarks, and perhaps I was wondering if there was a Horned Lark out there since I've still heard them so few times as to not yet be confident every time one is around. But whatever I was thinking, it wasn't, "Is that a Vesper Sparrow?" Now Merlin definitely still makes mistakes (it thought there was a Brown Thrasher and a Chestnut-sided Warbler earlier this morning), so I watched the screen closely as I continued to listen. Sure enough, a few seconds later, I heard what sounded like a passerelid song pattern and the app flash-highlighted Vesper Sparrow again. Unbelievable. I obviously wasn't as prepared as I would have liked or I would have recognized the song on my own, but the fact that it didn't end up mattering is mind-blowing to me. The entire morning had been going better than I reasonably could have imagined, so perhaps all that Uber nonsense that followed was some kind of twisted karmic balance playing out. Whatever the reason, I'm glad I at least had such a great haul of lifers to console my later extremely frustrated and worried self! The word "vesper" means evening prayer, so here's hoping these little guys sent one up for my job prospects.
Additional species
Technical information
- Recorder
- Microphone
- Accessories
- Original file size
- 422.04 KB