“I just got new hearing aids and now I can hear birds again. To see what I might be hearing I used my Sound ID app on Merlin that records all the bird songs. I was surprised when it recorded a Swamp Sparrow, but then I looked out at my feeder and there was a bird I never saw before. It had a rusty cap and looked just like the Swamp Sparrow picture in the book. Could I actually have had a Swamp Sparrow?” The call came from a Hart Beat Reader and good friend in Maine with whom I speak regularly, so I know he is familiar with most of the birds he sees.

Swamp Sparrows (top) are not common feeder birds, but they do sometimes come to feeders. They can be easily identified by checking the rusty-brown cap, the reddish shoulder patch and the dusky almost dirty seeming breast. Conversely, the other more common feeder bird with a red cap is the Chipping Sparrow (photo 2).

However, Chipping Sparrows should be easily separated from Swamp Sparrows because they are slightly smaller and have a pristine white breast and most significantly, a solid black line through the eyes, with a larger solid white line between the eyes and the rusty cap. In the fall when birds start changing into their winter plumage, Chipping Sparrows lose that distinctive rusty cap and adopt a dull brown head feathering (photo 3). Conversely, Swamp Sparrows, in the winter, maintain their rusty-brown cap but seem to lose some of their rusty coloring on the wings (photo 4).

Both Swamp Sparrows (photo 5 from Viera Wetlands) and Chipping Sparrows are strictly winter birds in Florida, while both species range into Canada in the summer. The year-round range of the Swamp Sparrow extends along the Atlantic coast from Maryland to Long Island and around the eastern Great Lakes - Ontario and Erie.

Conversely, the year-round range for Chipping Sparrows is much farther south, extending through eastern Georgia to North Carolina, and parts of the Gulf Coast in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana as well as a few spots in Texas. Range maps in the bird books show Chipping Sparrows as a winter resident of Florida, but I have never seen one in Florida and certainly don’t have any photos of one from Florida.

Many birders regard sparrows in general as ho-hum birds that certainly don’t measure up to the more exotic species such as warblers, tanagers, cardinals and the showiest of them all, the Painted Bunting. Nevertheless, they can be a challenge to identify and there is certainly something satisfying about being able to recognize and separate the different sparrow species and know more about them.

It might be like we humans: some are spectacularly beautiful or handsome, but many more are ordinary folk, like sparrows, just going about their business and making the world a more interesting place. Think about it: For every movie star or model there are thousands of the rest of us, sparrows, simply going about our business enjoying life to the fullest. And we would not want it any other way. 

For more information on Swamp Sparrows, see: www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Swamp_Sparrow/id

For more information on Chipping Sparrows, see: www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Chipping_Sparrow/id

For “Seven of the Coolest Sparrows in the United States,” see: abcbirds.org/blog20/coolest-sparrows/