It’s always fun to see what birds may show up in a migrating flock. Last week at dawn on a very rainy day I spotted a Fox Sparrow jumping around on the ground near the feeders.
Fox Sparrows are considered shy and they prefer to stay hidden, so perhaps that’s why it’s been such a challenge for me to snap a decent photograph of one over the years. Here’s a close-up thanks to Canva:
Fox Sparrows eat mostly insects in the warmer months, but they add fruit and seeds when insects are harder to find.
They are such beautiful birds (especially for a sparrow which many people simply lump into the category of LBJs or “little brown jobs”). It’s that beautiful reddish-brown color that catches the eye.
Another visitor that day was a pair of Purple Finches. I often see House Finches at my feeders (and now more than ever before), but rarely does a Purple Finch drop in. A Blue Jay kept scaring away the pretty male so I never got a photo.
But the female was not phased by that sassy Blue Jay.
Cornell’s Birds of the World website says “Although widespread and regularly seen, this bird is one of the least-studied finches in North America because it is neither common enough to be easily studied nor rare enough to be threatened with extinction.”
Both the Fox Sparrow and the Purple Finch pair only stayed around our backyard for a day before moving on.