Laura Erickson's For the Birds

My favorite sparrow breeds in the wet pastureland along Highway 13 in Bayfield County, and I spent many happy hours watching and listening to it when my mother-in-law lived there. This is one of my favorite of all birds for many reasons. It thrives in wet fields within its range where grass isn’t mowed until late summer.

The first time I ever saw any bird banded, at Whitefish Point in Michigan in 1976, the bird was my lifer Le Conte’s Sparrow. I was the one who found it while everyone else was indoors eating lunch. When I went in to tell everyone, the bander told me it was impossible—Le Conte’s Sparrow had never before been seen there. Joan Brigham, our group leader, believed me and followed me back out to see it. He reluctantly came along. When he saw it, he ran in and grabbed his banding equipment, yelling to the staff about the rare bird he found.

Anyway, he had our group walk it into a net. I’ll never forget seeing that tiny thing in his enormous hand. The sparrow didn’t look the least bit scared—he glared at the bander with a defiance that reminded me of Ahab confronting Moby Dick. When I got home, I looked up Gregory Peck’s weight, the weight of the largest sperm whale on record, and the weight of Le Conte’s Sparrow. And it turned out the sparrow was tinier, relative to a man, than a man was to a huge sperm whale!

To hear the high-frequency songs and calls of this or any other species with high-pitched vocalizations, even with my hearing aids, and to get a direction for them, I use Lang Elliott’s “Hear Birds Again”. The app is free to download, and the website has clear and easy directions to make the fairly inexpensive binaural headphones. To know if the bird is there in the first place, I use the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Merlin app.