All beginners in bird study find the sparrow family a hard one. There are so many kinds of sparrows, and the different kinds look so confusingly alike. How shall I ever be able to tell them apart? the novice says to himself.
Well, there is no royal road to such learning, it may as well be confessed. But there is a road, for all that, and a pretty good one,—the road of patience; and there is much pleasure to be had in following it. If you know one sparrow, be it only the so-called “English,” you have made a beginning.
If you know the English sparrow, I say; for, strange as it may seem, I find numbers of people who do not. Take the average inhabitant of any of our large cities into the country, and let him come upon an English sparrow in a wayside hedge, and there are three chances to one that he will not know with certainty what to call it. Quite as likely as not he has never noticed that there are two kinds of English sparrows, very differently feathered—the male and the female.
In a short chapter like this I am not going to attempt a miracle. If you read it to the end, never so carefully, you will not be prepared to name all the sparrows at sight. As I said before, they are a hard set. My wish now is to speak of two of the smallest and commonest.
One of these is called sometimes the chipping sparrow, sometimes the chipper, and sometimes—much less often—the doorstep sparrow. Personally, I like the last name best,—perhaps because I invented it. Scientific men, who prefer for excellent reasons to have their own names for things, call him Spizella socialis—that is to say, the familiar or social little spiza, or sparrow. The idea of littleness, some young readers may not know, is contained in the termination ella, which is what grammarians call a diminutive. Umbrella, for instance, is literally a small umbra, or shade.
With most readers of this book the chipping sparrow is a bird of spring, summer, and autumn. For the winter he retires to our extreme Southern States and to Mexico. If you live in Massachusetts, you may begin to be on the watch for him by the 5th of April. If your home is farther south, you should see him somewhat earlier.
Perhaps you will know him by this brief description: a very small, slender sparrow, with a dark chestnut-red crown, a black forehead, a black bill, and plain—unstreaked and unspotted—under parts.
His ordinary note, or call, is a chip (whence his name), and his song is a very dry, tuneless, monotonous, long-drawn chippy-chippy-chippy, uttered so fast as to sound almost like a trill. You may like the bird never so well, but if you have any idea of music, you will never call him a fine singer. What he and his mate think about the matter there is, of course, no telling. He seems to be very much in earnest, at all events.
He is a social bird, I say. You will not have to go far afield or into the woods in search of him. If you live in any sort of country place, with a bit of garden and a few shrubs and fruit trees, a pair of chippers will be likely to find you out. Their nest will be built in a tree or bush, a small structure neatly lined with hair, and in due time it will contain four or five eggs, blue or greenish blue, with brown spots.
Our other bird is of the chipper’s size, and, like him, has unstreaked and unspotted lower parts. His bill is of a light color, “reddish brown,” one book says, “pale reddish,” says another. This is one of the principal marks for the beginner to notice. Another is a wash of buff, or yellowish brown, on the sides of the breast. The upper parts, too, are in general much lighter than the chipper’s.