As I drive Texas farm roads during winter looking for birds on fences, I pay scant attention to Savannah sparrows. The commonly occurring winter bird has such a recognizable profile and brown color pattern that I take it for granted, as I too often do with the familiar northern cardinal or northern mockingbird.

It's a silly bias borne from the arrogance that I can identify a Savannah sparrow on a wire in the blink of an eye while cruising along at 30 or 45 mph looking for rarer birds such as LeConte's sparrow.

Yet I often chastise people for taking common birds for granted, recounting how many overlooked the passenger pigeon because they, too, were once so numerous as to excite little attention except from those who hunted them to extinction.

So I check myself to pay more attention to Savannah sparrows, named for the city in Georgia where one of the first specimens was collected in the 19th century. After all, they fit all the basic characteristics of many other grassland sparrows. Because they are so abundant in winter, they even may be used as a benchmark for identifying other sparrows, especially small ones with relatively notched ends on their tails.

Savannah sparrows have a number of geographic variations in plumage. They are not so variable as to be indistinguishable but variable enough that you can see differences in a line of the birds perched on a fence. The variety comes from the sparrows returning to breed at the place where they were born, which might be the Great Plains, Alaska, Hudson Bay, New England or the Great Lakes.

The wide breeding range has given us 17 subspecies of Savannah sparrows, many of which show up in all parts of Texas, September through May. The bird also spends winters across Southern states and into Mexico and Central America. A year-round population lives in western Mexico.

You can see them on prairies, in agricultural fields, wetlands and deserts, and around airports. They feed mostly on the ground for insects and grass seeds, and utter several high-pitched short notes followed by thin, long buzzes that sound like tit-tit-tit, zee-zeee.

I've learned to identify Savannah sparrows by a handful of basic field marks. The nape, back, wings and rump are gray-brown with some dark streaking. The birds have prominent eyebrows that are usually beige with a tinge of yellow between the base of the bill and the eyes (an area called the lores), although the eyebrows may appear dingy white. The breast has dark streaks that sometimes converge into a stickpin on the breast. Otherwise, the bird is creamy white underneath with dark streaking along the sides and flanks.

Shun the bad habit I have of sometimes ignoring them.

More Information


The Savannah sparrow may be used as a benchmark to identify other sparrows, which include:

Vesper sparrow:﻿﻿ white outer tail feathers when it flies and a prominent white eye ring.

Song sparrow: long, rounded tail and dark malar stripe bordered in white.

Grasshopper sparrow: buff face and breast with a thinner tail.
