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White-crowned Sparrow | Zonotrichia leucophrys
Witkruingors | Chingolo coroniblanco
The White-crowned Sparrow is the boldly striped sparrow of open scrub, from arctic tundra to the alpine meadows of the Rocky Mountains and the coastal dunes of California. It is among the most thoroughly studied songbirds in the world: much of what is known about song learning, hormones and migration in birds rests on work with this species.
Voice
The song opens with one or two clear sustained whistles and runs on into a series of husky or buzzy notes and a short trill. The shape differs by region: the coastal form sings more briskly and in clearer sections, the taiga forms more drawn out and wheezier. Dialects can change over a few kilometres and are learned by young males in their first months. The call is a sharp metallic pink, the flight note a thin tseep. In spring and at migration stopovers it sings at night as well.
Recording: Greg Irving — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Upper Fish Hatchery Road, Sequim, Clallam County, Washington, United States · xeno-canto
Identification
A slim, long-tailed sparrow with an upright stance and a small peak to the crown when alert. The head carries a black-and-white striped cap: a white central stripe, broad black side bands and a white supercilium. Face, throat and breast are plain grey; the back is grey-brown with rufous streaks and the wing shows two white bars. The bill is pink, orange-yellow or yellowish depending on the form. First-winter birds show the same head pattern, but in rusty brown and buff instead of black and white.
Confusion species
Golden-crowned Sparrow has a yellow or golden band in place of the white central stripe, a dark upper mandible and dingier grey underparts; young birds of the two species look much alike and are best separated on bill colour and the degree of head contrast. White-throated Sparrow has a sharply outlined white throat patch, a yellow spot before the eye and a dark bill. Within the species the forms can be told apart: the Pacific and western taiga forms have pale grey lores, while the eastern taiga and interior mountain forms have a black or dark brown lore reaching the bill.
Habitat
Breeds in open ground with scattered low shrubs: dwarf birch and willow tundra, alpine meadow at treeline, clearcuts, burns and coastal dune scrub. The nest is on the ground or low in a shrub. In winter it uses weedy fields, roadsides, hedgerows, chaparral (dense, hard-leaved scrub of California's Mediterranean climate) and gardens, often in flocks under feeders and close to dense cover.
Where the bird is most often found, arranged by the USNVC — the vegetation classification of the United States and Canada — and CMECS for sea and coast.
Range and movements
The breeding range covers nearly the whole North American tundra zone, from western Alaska through the Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut to Labrador and northern Quebec, and in addition the western mountains: the Rockies from Montana to Colorado and Utah, and the Sierra Nevada. Along the coast from southern British Columbia to central California it is resident or a short-distance migrant. Winter is spent in the southern United States and on the Mexican plateau, roughly from Baja California and Sonora to Tamaulipas and south to Jalisco and Hidalgo. Northern migrants cover up to 4000 kilometres. In western Europe it is a very rare vagrant.
- Resident
- Breeding (summer)
- Winter
- Passage
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
Where and when to look
In October and April it sits along almost every weedy ditch and woodland edge in the west; tap the brush and the birds come up one by one. On each bird check the lore: black to the bill or interrupted pale grey — that mark, with bill colour, identifies the form and so the origin of the flock.
Conservation
Partners in Flight puts the breeding population at about 79 million birds and the trend was stable between 1966 and 2019; the IUCN lists the species as Least Concern (LC), and it scores 7 out of 20 on the Continental Concern Score. There are local declines, particularly in the coastal form within built-up California, where scrub is lost. Work on urban birds showed that males adjust their song to traffic noise, and that during the quiet of the 2020 lockdown song became softer and wider in range.
Scientific name
Zonotrichia leucophrys | (Forster, 1772)
Johann Reinhold Forster described the species in 1772 as Emberiza leucophrys, from specimens taken at the Severn River on the west shore of Hudson Bay; the move to Zonotrichia puts author and year in parentheses. Zonotrichia is Greek, from zōnē 'band' and thrix 'hair'. Leucophrys comes from leukos 'white' and ophrus 'eyebrow', after the white supercilium. The English and Dutch names point instead to the white central stripe across the crown.