The floor of the forest clearing exploded with a dozen gray bits of matter shooting out in all directions. Flashes of white told me it was a flock of juncos. But what had frightened them into fleeing?
A split-second later, a sharp-shinned hawk sliced through the clearing. The juncos had seen the hawk before I did. They had to; their survival depended on it.
The behavior that I'd witnessed is characteristic of juncos: They forage on the ground, so inconspicuous that you can fail to see even a big flock of them. Then when danger appears, they dash off in all directions. This confuses a predator; it doesn't know which of a dozen birds to follow. That instant of hesitation is all the juncos need to escape to safety.
The hawk landed on a branch 15 feet off the ground at the edge of the clearing. It was small for a sharpie, therefore likely a male. Like most birds of prey, males tend to be smaller than females. He waggled his long, slender tail feathers and ruffled his mantle, frustrated and perhaps a little embarrassed that he had missed nailing one of the juncos.
Juncos are in a group of birds often referred to as "little brown jobs" or LBJs. That's because most of them are so nondescript and seen so fleetingly that they are hard to tell one from another. Most LBJs are sparrows — skulkers that hide in weed patches — and they can be among the more challenging of birds for beginning birders.
But juncos are not really LBJs. They are easily seen, easy to recognize and so common that you can enjoy them in your backyard by providing readily available bird seed in a way that meets these birds' feeding needs.
Along with towhees, they are the sparrows that aren't thought of as sparrows. Perhaps it's because these birds don't look like typical sparrows, and their name doesn't reflect their close relationship to these birds. Towhees are the largest of the North American sparrows, and with black heads, backs and breasts, rusty sides and white bellies, they are the most colorful.
A pair of towhees likes to nest in my shrubs each summer. Along with the song sparrow, chipping sparrow and field sparrow, towhees are year-round residents found throughout our area where they fill summer mornings with their pretty songs.
The uncommon grasshopper sparrow breeds here but spends the winter months farther south.
Juncos are winter residents, starting to arrive in late October and increasing in numbers until they become quite common before they begin to depart for their breeding grounds in late April. They're the little gray birds with white bellies and pinkish or whitish bills. The name — dark-eyed junco — might seem odd, since most sparrows, indeed most birds, have dark eyes. But this distinguishes them from the yellow-eyed junco that resides in Mexico, barely reaching into the U.S. in Arizona and New Mexico.
Because they only show up in wintertime, juncos are widely known as snowbirds. Other winter sparrows, more deserving of the LBJ label, are savannah, fox, swamp, vesper, white-crowned, and one that is every bit as abundant as the junco, the white-throated sparrow.
If your yard has a good amount of shrubs and trees that provide roosting and hiding places for sparrows, and if you provide a good seed mix on the ground, one that includes mostly white millet and cracked corn, you may attract towhees, song sparrows and white-throated sparrows as well as juncos. With a decent pair of binoculars, attracting these birds to your yard where you can study them easily is a great way to begin to learn the field marks that distinguish these birds.
Email
Facebook
Google
Twitter
Favorites
More
Advertisement