I had gotten back from my trip to Hope and Manning Park on Saturday night, and I hadn't planned on going out on Sunday to take photos. However, when I checked the web, I found a short report from a fellow named Brian, who had, amongst other things, seen a White-throated Sparrow near a stone bridge in Stanley Park. I'd met Brian once or twice in the field before, and he's a very reliable fellow.

I'd never seen a White-throated Sparrow before, and I have a bit of a soft spot for sparrows, so I didn't want to pass this opportunity up. The weather was good, and I was afraid that the bird might just go on migrating instead of hanging around in Vancouver for a while. This made me think it was imperative to get out to see the bird on Sunday rather than relaxing and then going out on Monday or later.

I headed in towards the city on Route 1 from Burnaby, and rather than fight the city traffic, I took the Second Narrows and the Lions Gate to get to the park; this worked out well.

Arriving, I stopped near Second Beach and headed towards the only stone bridge that I knew about, which is the one on a little stream that goes from Lost Lagoon towards the beach. On the near side of the bridge (the north), I found no sparrows, but once I crossed over, I found a little area that was swarming with them: a place with stone cobbles between the stone bridge and a wooden bridge.

It was a shady area, and it took my eyes a little while to adjust from having been out in the bright sunlight. I set the ISO on my camera up, and I ended up with a lot of photos that look a lot brighter than it actually was.

As I started scanning the sparrows in front of me, I first noticed that most of them were Dark-eyed Juncos, like this fellow.

I shortened my tripod and took up a seat on the ground, both to take it easy on my back and to get low-angle photos.

I continued to look through the sparrows, who were in the dark, hopping and flitting around quite a bit, and scaring up into the bushes every time someone came near...and it was a busy day in the park. All this made it pretty hard to know which of the birds on the ground I had looked at already and which ones I hadn't, so I just continually scanned through the whole group.

The second most common fellows seemed to be Song Sparrows.

He's not, though, he's a Mute Swan.

Sparrow is a general term that we use for birds in the families Emberizidae and Passeridae. Most North-American sparrows are in Emberizidae, and within Emberizidae there is a genus known as Zonotrichia. Zonotrichia includes my sought-after White-throated Sparrow, and also the locally-common White-crowned and Yellow-crowned Sparrows. Zonotrichia sparrows are fairly distinctive, with plump breasts, long tails, and a barred wing pattern.

Well, I had been looking through lots of sparrows and hadn't seen any Zonotrichia, not even the locals. I was thinking that this was not boding well for me.

About the time I was thinking this, this fellow came out of the shadows and trundled by.

A handsome fellow, that White-throated.

A little while after, a birder by the name of Graham came by, and we waited for the bird to reappear. Unfortunately, it didn't, at least while Graham was there. I waited after he had left, and the time passed slowly. About 40 minutes after I first lost my target, I again spotted a white-throated bird in the underbrush.

This fellow looked a bit different, though. First, there is the little red bit right above his bill, but that could be just a piece of a berry that he had stuck his bill into. The more troubling thing about this bird's appearance is that the stripe above his eye (called the supercilium) looked tan rather than white.

It turns out that there are two types of White-throated Sparrows, known informally as the tan morph and the white morph. One of the obvious differences between the morphs (and the reason for their names) is the color of their superciliums. This started me thinking that I had found not one, but two White-throated Sparrows.

I didn't think it was likely that I, a relatively wet-behind-the-ears birder, would find an second uncommon bird where one had been reported; it was more likely that I just wasn't that familiar with the different appearances that one bird can have under different lighting and postural conditions.

I kept taking photos of the bird, though, and it certainly appears that this bird has a tan supercilium, as it is significantly darker than the white on his throat.

I again got photos only for a few minutes before I lost the bird into the bushes behind me. At that point, I packed up and headed home.

At home I thought that my photos confirmed the one-bird theory, and I posted some of them for the local birding community, along with commentary implying that I thought I had just one bird. A fellow named Chris responded, saying that the original report (one before Brian's, which I had missed) said there were two birds, and that he himself (Chris) had been there and seen a tan morph, so it looks like the photos can be trusted and I did actually see two different white-throats, of different morphs. That was pretty neat, to never have seen either of them before and then to see them both at the same place.

Sittin' with the sparrows,
Tom