Because I shoot video with my iPhone, which has limited resolution and no creditable zoom, I suggest you hit “play” on this video and look at this photo at Wikipedia, which was taken not far away.
If you’re stubborn and want to find the bird in the video — and I suspect some birders won’t have much trouble — there are two short branches on the creosote (dark green plant in mid-upper center) that arch off upward and to the right. The bird is the gray pixel just beneath the right end of the top of those branches. Though he’s blurry in the visual sense, his song is clear and loud.
It’s a black-throated sparrow, an insect- and seed-eating bird that’s reasonably common in the desert, though getting less so as more of its scrub habitat gets turned into non-scrub non-habitat, whether by fire or bulldozer. Conversion of intact desert doesn’t just hurt endangered species: it hurts members of common species as well.
Anyway, this guy is doing okay for now, and he’ll be doing even better in a couple weeks. The desert around him — this was on the South Lykken Trail on Friday — is about to burst into bloom. On Saturday we met my writer’s group friend Jon Z. and his Significant Other for lunch, and walking around downtown Palm Springs I was distracted by the yellow swathes on the hillside: incienso unfolding its dozens of flowers per plant. Tons of flowers means tons of insects, so this sparrow should be set for a while — and then when all those flowers set seed, so much the better.
Black-throated sparrow is one of those creatures that doesn’t need to drink very much in the desert, relying on the water it gets from its food — either directly or by metabolizing starches and such. Seeds have less juice in them than insects, so the sparrows tend to drink more in the fall when seeds make up more of their diet.
This time of year they’re nice company, the males singing a bit brashly and not particularly bothered by human admirers. In a few weeks I’ll get myself up the road to Cima Dome and watch them there too.
Oh, and this was on an end-to-end South Lykken hike, the first time I’d done that. A nice four miles and thousand feet or so depending on your reference, and the prettiest trail I’ve walked in town yet. Though that’s not much of a statement given my sample size of two.
1 comment on "Amphispiza bilineata"
What a sweet song!
Beauty is all around if we just stop and look. And listen.