Rare Birds: A Harris's Sparrow in Yolo County

The sparrow streak continues!!  After the White-throated Sparrow on Sunday and Clay-colored Sparrow on Tuesday, I thought I had a good chance at seeing yet another lifer sparrow, a Harris's Sparrow that has been seen reliably since its discovery on February 22 near Putah Creek, in Yolo County.  Eric and I were able to take the day yesterday to search for this continuing rarity, as well as explore a couple of birding hotspots in the area that I have been wanting to see.

Once again, I owe this find to the good folks on eBird, fellow birders who have kindly described the exact location of this rare Harris's Sparrow.  For the last couple of weeks, it has been seen daily, foraging on the ground along a small country road on the campus of UC Davis, beneath a row of olive trees.  Specifically, beneath the first three olive trees at the south end of the row, on the east side of the road!  

We arrived at the spot just as a Sharp-shinned Hawk shot off like a bullet through the understory.  Needless to say, all was silent on the bird front.  Some blackbirds continued their quarrels in a nearby field and a Black Phoebe went about its nesting preparations by an old building, but most of the other birds were completely silent in the wake of the would-be predator.  The Harris's Sparrow has been hanging out with a large flock of White-crowned Sparrows (fellow "crowned" sparrows in the genus Zonotrichia, which also includes Golden-crowned and White-throated Sparrows), but not a single sparrow was to be heard anywhere.  After a few minutes, a few sparrows began singing from farther up the road, so, since no birds had shown up at the south end of the olive row, we wandered slowly along the road until a few birds dropped down from the trees to resume their foraging.  The ground under the olive trees was littered with a spongy layer of leaf duff and ripe olives, a veritable feast for fruit-eating songbirds.  Dozens of Yellow-rumped warblers fluttered along the ground, along with American Robins, Western Bluebirds, a few Northern Mockingbirds and a handful of bickering European Starlings.  But most of the birds were White-crowned Sparrows: scads and scads of White-crowned Sparrows.

The quiet country road was more busy than I had expected it to be, and each time a vehicle, cyclist or jogger with a dog went by, the mixed flock of sparrows and warblers took to the trees.  Concealed in the dense foliage of the olive trees, the birds were essentially invisible, and all we could do was wait until they dropped down to the ground again to resume their foraging.  This became our routine: scan the flock until they flew to cover, wait for the car/cyclist/dog to pass, wait for the birds to fly back to the ground, continue to scan the flock.  Scan, wait, wait, scan, repeat.  (Any birder who has birded doggedly in the wind will know this pattern was broken numerous times by the need to wipe watering eyes and a runny nose as well!)  We sifted through several more mixed flocks of White-crowned Sparrows and Dark-eyed Juncos, and waited a while longer at the south end of the olive trees before hunger and other needs of nature drove us temporarily away.

After a break for lunch etc., we resumed our post on the side of the road under the olive trees.  (Rare birds turn up in odd places; birders turn up in even odder ones.)  My gut feeling was to stick close to the south end of the row of trees, since that was where the majority of the sparrow sightings had been.  And as I have repeated several times now, overwintering sparrows are extremely faithful to one small, dependable foraging area and can be relied upon to turn up in the same spot day after day.  

Our patience was finally rewarded when, after three hours (including the aforementioned lunchbreak), I finally spotted the bird: an absolutely beautiful adult Harris's Sparrow.  

My pulse jumped as a bird with a large pink bill, black face and bib, and white belly suddenly materialized in my binoculars.  It blended in extremely well with the leaf litter: one moment I was looking at the olive-studded ground, the next I was staring right at a beautiful new-to-me bird!  At 7.5 inches long, its large size alone was enough to distinguish it from the other sparrows: the Harris's Sparrow is North America's largest sparrow, apart from the towhees.  Indeed, this bird behaved much like a towhee, scratching diligently in the leaf litter with an endearing two-footed hop.

A Harris's Sparrow in full breeding plumage must be a striking sight, but one I am unlikely to ever see: the breeding grounds of this large and somewhat elusive sparrow are high in northern Canada, where boreal forest opens up into tundra in a matrix of stunted spruce and larch, dwarf shrubby thickets, dense patches of lichen and open tundra.  Wild country indeed!  Because of its remote breeding grounds, it was one of the last North American breeding birds to have its nest discovered and described; the first nest of the Harris's Sparrow wasn't discovered until 1931.  (The last North American bird to have its nest discovered was the Marbled Murrelet, the nests of which, hidden as they are in redwood trees of all places, were not discovered until 1974!)   

It is also worth noting that the Harris's Sparrow holds the distinction of being the only songbird that breeds exclusively in Canada and nowhere else in the world!

After the brief Arctic breeding season, Harris's Sparrows migrate south in flocks, traveling through the Great Plains east of the Rocky Mountains to arrive on their wintering grounds in America's heartland, largely in Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.  Every year, however, a few "lost" birds show up on the Pacific Coast.  Even so, it may be quite some time before I see one of these beautiful sparrows again!

Range of the Harris's Sparrow.  Source: audubon.org

Despite the intermittent but steady stream of traffic along the small back road where we stood watching the birds, our Harris's Sparrow wasn't phased in the least by passing cars or joggers.  It contentedly went about its business, like there was nothing the least bit strange about hanging out along a country road under some olive trees, while I dreamed about the remote northern country, wild and rugged, where it hatched and fledged.  We watched our Harris's Sparrow uninterrupted for about 25 minutes while it foraged beneath the trees, scratching in the leaf litter and eating olives.  Much to our amusement, many of the White-crowned Sparrows it was associating with had dark stains around their bills from the olives they had been consuming, like they had applied some type of makeup in an effort to look more like their visitor.  Maybe this is why the Harris's Sparrow felt so at home!