Attracting Sparrows to Your Feeder

Some birds are more "of the air" than others. Those falcons I mentioned last week are almost always seen in the air. Some, like that mystery warbler from the week before, are usually skulking in the brush. By the way, I returned to the refuge in Longmeadow a few days after we missed that warbler and spent two hours scouring the weedy edges. Finally I went down a narrow trail heavy with small saplings, brush, and tall weeds. Suddenly a bird popped up and perched low in a bush in plain sight, not ten feet away. It had a gray throat and head, complete white eye ring and a fully yellowed belly. It was a Connecticut warbler. How can you be so lucky? A friend of mine finds one every fall at Arcadia Sanctuary in Northampton, including one a week earlier, and I have been envious for years when my searches were in vain.

The best skulkers are the family of birds known as sparrows. It is an interesting family even if they all seem to look alike. Some people call them LBJs, or "little brown jobs." You will be reading about them a lot in this column during the coming weeks because they all share one quality that makes them very interesting to those who feed birds. They eat seeds.

Without that ability, come October they would be gone far to the south with all the other insect eating birds. How then would we be able to entice them to our back yard to brighten up a cold day? Each autumn the back yard can become a source of the exotic, as sparrows from the far north arrive to sample the fare we offer.

There are thirteen species of native sparrows that are present in our region sometime during the year, ten of which will visit feeders in the fall. Their favorite food is white millet, which is fairly inexpensive and can be bought in fifty-pound bulk. Spread up to a quart evenly on each ground feeding area every day. Never put this or the standard mixed seed in any kind of enclosed feeder unless it has a large tray where the birds may alight and stand easily. Sparrows feed upright on the ground where they have a stable footing. They rarely cling to perches as they feed. The small sunflower chips are also good to spread lightly on the ground each day. Then the cardinals, close relatives of the sparrows, will also come in to eat. Sunflower or thistle are the only seeds that should go in an enclosed feeder where the birds must cling.

In the summer I only spread the chips, but come fall the millet is added, and look what comes to my yard. This week up to eleven white-crowned sparrows were picking up seeds as fast as they could, now chasing each other around, now spooked into the nearby bush. Also sneaking in for a bite were chipping sparrows, song sparrows, and a few white-throated sparrows. For cover near the feeding area you need a deciduous bush that grows thick and dense or perhaps an untidy brush pile. You may not get these species if you live in the city or a well-groomed suburb. Perfect lawns and well weeded flower beds are as sterile and unwelcoming to these wild sparrows as city pavement is. Letting some grass grow long and go to seed in late summer, or allowing weeds to flourish along the edges are more likely to attract sparrows to your yard. Those who want to see rare sparrows seek out croplands or large gardens still overgrown with weeds before the owner plows them under.

The white-crowned sparrows come from far away, breeding in the northern continent from Quebec to Alaska. In fall a strong cold front with northwest winds will bring many of them to New England, but almost all will continue farther south as winter approaches. They are much more abundant in the Mississippi Valley and the far west. The adults are the most handsome of sparrows, their underparts a glossy, smooth gray topped by contrasting black and white crown stripes. Those stripes are dull reddish-brown and gray on the immature, and the overall color is browner.

Either version is a treat to watch in the yard on an early October day, bright or gray.