Swamp Sparrow
Melospiza georgiana
eBird describes the Swamp Sparrow like this: A medium-sized sparrow with attractive rufous and gray pattern. Slightly smaller than Song Sparrow, with a blurrier look overall (like a watercolor vs. an oil painting). Look for bright reddish-brown wings and relatively plain underparts. Adults are plain grayish below with buffy sides; males have a rufous crown. Immatures often show buffy tones on the face and streaking on the underparts, but never as crisp and extensive as Lincoln’s Sparrow. Breeds in cattail marshes and other wetlands; found in a variety of shrubby habitats during migration and winter, but often in wet areas. Typically not in flocks with other sparrows, and rarely visits feeders. Compare especially with Song and Lincoln’s Sparrows. All About Birds provides this additional descriptive information about the Swamp Sparrow: Swamp Sparrows provide sweet accompaniment to spring mornings in boreal bogs, sedge swamps, cattail marshes, and wet brushy meadows. Their clear, mellifluous trills resonate through wetlands from central Canada to the eastern United States, where Swamp Sparrows are fairly common but often hidden among aquatic plants. A vivid rusty cap and wings, combined with subtler browns, grays, buff, and black of the body, simultaneously blend with their marshy habitats and make them gloriously attractive in earth tones.
I saw and photographed my first Swamp Sparrow at Lafitte’s Cove Bird Sanctuary on the morning of April 19, 2021. I typically have trouble identifying sparrows in the field and this one was no different. With Merlin and Sibley’s help, I am pretty confident of my identification: solid roufous wing coverts, grey head with roufous cap, and lack of wingbars.
“Cool Facts” About The Swamp Sparrow From All About Birds:
- The Swamp Sparrow has longer legs than other members of its genus; this adaptation allows it to wade into shallow water to forage. This species even sometimes sticks its head under water to try to capture aquatic invertebrates.
- The Swamp Sparrow was first described to science in 1790 by John Latham, an English physician remembered as the “grandfather of Australian ornithology.” He named the species georgiana because the specimen he used for his description had come from the state of Georgia in the new United States of America.
- A Swamp Sparrow banded in eastern Massachusetts on October 4, 1937, was found in central Florida in January 1938, about 1,125 miles away. Before the development of tracking devices, banding returns such as this one helped clarify migration patterns for many bird species.
- Described first in 1951, the “Coastal Plain” Swamp Sparrow is a distinctive subspecies that nests from northern Virginia to southeastern New York. Ornithologists named it nigrescens because of its blackish nape, but it also has a larger bill and grayer plumage than the other two subspecies. Coastal plain birds, which nest in brackish marshes along rivers rather than in freshwater marshes, also lay one fewer egg, on average, than their more northerly or inland relatives.
- The oldest recorded Swamp Sparrow was at least 7 years, 10 months old when it was recaptured and rereleased during banding operations in Maryland.