An Intimate Visit with a Swamp Sparrow

The Swamp Sparrow is a rusty brown and gray sparrow that prefers wet habitat, such as moist, over-grown farm fields, marshes, water edges and other wet areas overgrown with briars and bushes. These conditions make Seven Islands State Birding Park a great place for wintering Swamp Sparrows!

Swamp Sparrow

The KTOS (Knoxville Chapter of TOS) banding team set up banding nets in this morning's moist cold at Seven Islands State Birding Park to document the current wintering bird population. The word for the day was wind!  BRRRR!  

The morning net captures started off slow and only got slower.  The birds seemed to be hunkering down under cover to escape the 9 mph wind.  In order to capture birds in the mist nets, the birds have to be moving around.      

This is one of the few times I have witnessed a "slow" banding morning at Seven Islands.  Most of the time we are working constantly to get the birds processed as quickly as possible, sometimes without a break until all the nets are taken down.  The good outcome of this slow morning was the ability to take a closer look at some of the birds we did band.

All of the bird images in this post are of Swamp Sparrows.  Above and below you can see the colors of the feathers on the crown of the sparrow.  The cap is considered rusty, but it can also appear almost black in some light. You can see the reason why.  Black feathers are mixed in with the rust ones.

The Swamp Sparrow has prominant rusty feathers streaked with black on its crown, shoulders and back, and has an overall rusty and gray appearance when seen in the field.    

This individual had buffy feathers mixed in with the gray on its face and had an overall lighter appearance, but the rusty features are still prominent.

Below, you can see the dull gray breast feathers with a little more white around the throat and on the lower abdomen on this individual.  These are individual characteristics that you often don't see in the field and are beautiful to observe in the hand.

Above you see the "dusty" or buffy eye-ring and an almost yellowish eye-brow on this individual. Compare the above sparrow's buffy appearance to the darker gray coloration of the sparrow below. These are both Swamp Sparrows and, in the field, they are both recognizable by their rusty cap, rusty back and shoulders and their overall gray appearance.

Below, Billie Cantwell, bander apprentice, holds a Swamp Sparrow for Mark Armstrong, our Master Bander, while he documents the plumage on this sparrow.

Above, a view of the Swamp Sparrow's rusty back with black feather streaking.  

Above and below, banding team members, dressed for the wind, visit with each other and discuss plans between net runs.

Sumac seeds below.

The French Broad River, that borders the park on three sides, is one of the features that helps attract a variety of birds and wildlife species to the park.

Visit my previous posts on bird banding.
Knoxville Chapter, Tennessee Ornithological Society
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Seven Islands State Birding Park