Laura Erickson's For the Birds

(Recording of a Harris’ Sparrow)

One of the first new birds that I saw when I came to Minnesota that I had never seen in Michigan or Madison, Wisconsin, was Harris’ Sparrow. This most tall, dark, and handsome of all sparrows is a regular visitor during migration at many feeders here in the Northland, especially during fall, but it’s virtually unheard of further east. These birds are actually common on their wintering grounds from central Texas north to Nebraska, and are abundant migrants through the Dakotas. They breed in the stunted boreal forest west and north of Hudson Bay. Long ago many of them probably lived their whole lives without ever seeing a shade tree, but as people desecrated the Great Plains they’ve been harder and harder pressed to find their proper habitat where it belongs.

Harris’s Sparrows were first recorded by Thomas Nuttall, who shot one on April 28, 1834, on an expedition across Missouri. On May 13th of the same year Maximilian, Prince of Wied, shot some in Nebraska. But both of them were rather laid back about reporting their discovery—it took the Prince seven years, and Nuttall six, to get around to publishing their accounts. The species was thus left out of the first edition of John James Audubon’s Birds of America—the Elephant Folio. But in 1843, Audubon came across some near Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, shot a few, and named the species for his friend Edward Harris, who was traveling with him at the time. Eventually the American Ornithologists’ Union accepted the scientific name given by Nuttall, who described the species first, but kept Audubon’s common name because with Audubon’s huge following from his popular second edition—the octavo edition—of Birds of America, his was the name in common usage.

It took fully another 60 years before anyone found Harris’ Sparrow on its breeding grounds, up in northernmost central Canada. And it took almost a full century before George Miksch Sutton first discovered the nest of this most secretive sparrow, after a long and frustrating search. He wrote:

As I knelt to examine the nest a thrill the like of which I had never felt before passed through me. And I talked aloud! ‘Here!’ I said. ‘Here in this beautiful place!’ At my fingertips lay treasures that were beyond price. Mine was Man’s first glimpse of the eggs of the Harris’s Sparrow, in the lovely bird’s wilderness home.

Although Sutton had the soul of a poet and artist, he had the reflexes of an ornithologist of that time, and so he immediately shot the female and collected the nest with its precious living eggs to make into museum specimens. Thus human knowledge advances.

Adult male Harris’s Sparrows are beyond compare. They are quite big for sparrows, weighing about 1 1/2 ounces, and the black crown and throat, contrasting with gray cheeks with a slight black ear mark, and the pink bill, make them both striking and easy to identify. Fall birds are browner and duller.

Harris’s sparrows have a song full of plaintiveness and beauty. Their short visit through the Northland, combined with their secretive ways, makes seeing them at a backyard feeder one of the most memorable and precious events of the spring.

(Recording of a Harris’ Sparrow)

This is Laura Erickson, and this program has been “For the Birds.”