Called also: CANADA SPARROW; WINTER CHIPPY; TREE BUNTING; WINTER
CHIP-BIRD; ARCTIC CHIPPER
Length -- 6 to 6.35 inches. About the same size as the English
sparrow.
Male -- Crown of head bright chestnut. Line over the eye, cheeks,
throat, and breast gray, the breast with an indistinct black
spot on centre. Brown back, the feathers edged with black and
buff. Lower back pale grayish brown. Two whitish bars across
dusky wings; tail feathers bordered with grayish white.
Underneath whitish.
Female -- Smaller and less distinctly marked.
Range -- North America, from Hudson Bay to the Carolinas, and
westward to the plains.
Migrations -- October. April. Winter resident.
A revised and enlarged edition of the friendly little chipping sparrow, that
hops to our very doors for crumbs throughout the mild weather, comes out of
British America at the beginning of winter to dissipate much of the winter's
dreariness by his cheerful twitterings. Why he should have been called a tree
sparrow is a mystery, unless because he does not frequent trees
-- a reason with sufficient plausibility to commend the name to several of
the early ornithologists, who not infrequently called a bird precisely what it
was not. The tree sparrow actually does not show half the preference for trees
that its familiar little counterpart does, but rather keeps to low bushes when
not on the ground, where we usually find it. It does not crouch upon the
ground like the chippy, but with a lordly carriage holds itself erect as it
nimbly runs over the frozen crust. Sheltered from the high, wintry winds in
the furrows and dry ditches of ploughed fields, a loose flock of these active
birds keep up a merry hunt for fallen seeds and berries, with a belated beetle
to give the grain a relish. As you approach the feeding ground, one bird gives
a shrill alarm-cry, and instantly five times as many birds as you suspected
were in the field take wing and settle down in the scrubby undergrowth at the
edge of the woods or by the wayside. No still cold seems too keen for them to
go a-foraging; but when cutting winds blow through the leafless thickets the
scattered remnants of a flock seek the shelter of stone walls, hedges, barns,
and cozy nooks about the house and garden. It is in mid-winter that these
birds grow most neighborly, although even then they are distinctly less
sociable than their small chippy cousins.
By the first of March, when the fox sparrow and the bluebird attract the
lion's share of attention by their superior voices, we not infrequently are
deaf to the modest, sweet little strain that answers for the tree sparrow's
love-song. Soon after the bird is in full voice, away it goes with its flock
to their nesting ground in Labrador or the Hudson Bay region. It builds,
either on the ground or not far from it, a nest of grasses, rootlets, and
hair, without which no true chippy counts its home complete.