In mid-April my birding friend and I interrupted our Saturday errands to visit a little natural area in the city. The moment I stepped out of the car I heard a bird call I wasn’t familiar with.
That sweet little rusty-brown bird is a Fox Sparrow. I see them in my yard sometimes in very late fall, but I don’t think I had ever heard one sing before.
Fox Sparrows prefer feeding in dense vegetation like thickets, so it was neat to see this bird out in the open.
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology says about Fox Sparrows: The nineteenth century naturalist William Brewster was inspired by the rich song of breeding Fox Sparrows in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. “At all hours of the day,” he wrote, “in every kind of weather late into the brief summer, its voice rises among the evergreen woods filling the air with quivering, delicious melody, which at length dies softly, mingling with the soughing of the wind in the spruces, or drowned by the muffled roar of the surf beating against neighboring cliffs.”