Birds: Part III

More birds on this Sunday morning.  Let the theme be... sparrows!

Near and dear to my heart more than any other group of birds.  I'm firmly in their corner when it comes to defending them against people who think of them only as "Little Brown Jobs."  Sacrilegious, I say. 

This is a Nelson's Sparrow. She's a female that my mosquito-bitten field helper and I stumbled upon while we were looking and listening for males to try to target net in wet, marshy meadows at the mouth of the Moose River in northern Ontario.  She must have had a nest nearby because she was unhappy that we were near and tried to distract us and lure us away from her nest by flitting around from one side of us to another.  

We set up the mist net, and after some strategic chasing, we captured, banded and sampled her.  This photo was snapped before she was captured.  It drove poor Randy crazy that I was taking pictures before we'd captured her, but I really had no doubt that she would not fly away - she wouldn't leave her nest.  And it is a very rare thing to be so close to these birds when they're out in the open.  I couldn't miss the chance to get a shot.

Her stats (for anyone even slightly interested): blood mercury = 0.32 ppm; breast feather mercury = 0.61 ppm; first primary feather mercury = 6.74 ppm.  She weighed 15.5 grams, and her bill was 9.0 mm from nares (nostril) to tip.  For the sake of reference, the U.S. EPA prefers that women of child-bearing age having blood mercury levels lower than 0.006 ppm.  If you do the math, this lady sparrow had a blood mercury concentration over 50 times as high as what the EPA would recommend if she were human. Scary thought.   

These are Seaside Sparrows - close cousins to the Nelson's Sparrow above.  These guys (I don't really know if they're guys, but if you can't tell one way or the other, every sparrow gets called a guy) were captured during the non-breeding season near Wrightsville Beach, NC.  

Saltmarsh (left) and Nelson's Sparrows captured during the non-breeding season in NC.  Saltmarsh Sparrows are close relatives to both Seasides and Nelson's.  They all belong in the same genus.  Still think these guys are Little Brown Jobs?  

Another sparrow relative - the Savannah Sparrow.  Savannahs are found in a different genus from the marshy sparrows above.  I caught them sometimes in the marshes along with Nelson's, Saltmarsh and Seaside Sparrows, but I just photographed them and let them go.  No poking and prodding for them.  

These two are White-crowned Sparrows - male (above) and female.  They belong to yet another sparrow genus and were photographed in New Mexico.  

Unlike the colorful birds I posted about last time I was writing about birds (for fun), sparrows have a different specialty.  Subtlety.   And for that, I give them kudos.