The rains fell in California this week, and I hadn't been to the west campus pond in a long stretch of weeks, but today the sun was out, and so were lots of birds. I now have a large backlog of pictures from the west campus and from the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge, so expect plenty of them here in coming days. Today was a new discovery (for me) on the west campus at MJC. It appears to be a Sooty Fox Sparrow (
Passerella iliaca unalaschcensis). I'm not surprised I haven't seen them before; I barely noticed this one in the leaves on the ground at the "mini-wilderness".
The Sooty Fox Sparrow breeds between the Aleutian Islands and the Olympic Peninsula and migrates into California (this one anyway). It is one of many subspecies of the Fox Sparrow, and according to some of the sources I read, it may be elevated to a separate species.
As always, I welcome comments and gently applied corrections to my amateur identification skills!
No comments:
Post a Comment