[Tweeters] White-crowned Sparrow subspecies and. . . dialects?

[Tim Brennan via Tweeters]

Hey Tweets,

Bird songs have always grabbed my attention, and one of the first songs that I learned as I got into birding was the one you may be hearing everywhere right now - White-crowned Sparrows. They're so ubiquitous. It's easy to pick up the song once you recognize it. In Puget Sound, we get, the Pugetensis subspecies, and it generally sings this song: XC647617 White-crowned Sparrow (Zonotrichia leucophrys) :: xeno-canto<https://xeno-canto.org/647617>. My kids know it, and occasionally thank me, "Thanks, Dad. . . White crowned Sparrow sang through my entire math test. . . Big help."

Sprinkled in with that subspecies is the Gambelii subspecies. There are distinctive field marks for these as well, with bill color being distinctly different between the two, but they sing this song: XC830272 White-crowned Sparrow (Zonotrichia leucophrys) :: xeno-canto<https://xeno-canto.org/830272>. This subspecies is prevalent on the East side of the state, although some Pugetensis can be heard over there too, just rarely.

A couple of weeks ago, I as down in North Beach, and heard this kind of song: XC143211 White-crowned Sparrow (Zonotrichia leucophrys) :: xeno-canto<https://xeno-canto.org/143211> in multiple locations, along with the (to me) more typical Pugetensis songs. I didn't have my binoculars with me at the time, but this bugged me for a bit, and then I forgot about it.

Today, I came across this article: Song overproduction, selective attrition and song dialects in the white-crowned sparrow - PubMed (nih.gov)<https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11124888/>, which identifies the Columbia River as the border between two dialects. Fun to come across something to make sense of the strange third song, and looking closer on Xeno-Canto, they clearly identified those types of songs as Pugetensis. It's about the only song you can find for them once you get deeper into Oregon.

Fun find, and I'm curious if anyone else had been puzzled by the "outrageous accents" from south of the border.

Happy birding,

Tim Brennan
Renton
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman11.u.washington.edu/pipermail/tweeters/attachments/20240526/7956a71c/attachment.html>