Day 19 - January 19, 2012

On the way home, I thought I would give the Upper Grassy Hill Road section a shot. In the spring/summer, I have seen bobolinks and kestrels here and today I was hoping for a sparrow or two.

Since I was coming from Southbury, I first stopped at a pond that is near a field but nothing was there.

I drove up to the big field - the one across the road from the 'airport' (airplane hangar)- parked the car near that small building, got out, and started to check out the shrubs.

As I started to walk along the shrubs, I saw some sparrows moving around. So I stepped further out into the street in order not to scare them away. I was able to see a few of them in the binocs and saw their streaked breasts with a central spot. Song Sparrows, I thought! But as I continued to look at them, I saw yellowish-green feathers on the sides of their heads - I have never seen this on a song sparrow before. So once I got back to the car, I looked through both my Sibley and Peterson guides trying to find pictures of sparrows with streaked breasts, central spot, and yellow/green on sides of heads. No luck!

So when I got home, the first thing I did was to send out an email on the CTBIRD list serve telling what I saw and asking if any more experienced birder had an ideas. It wasn't long before I received emails from Greg Hanisek and Ken Elkins - both well known birders in CT (Greg writes nature articles for the Waterbury Republican-American newspaper and has a blog (http://blogs.rep-am.com/nature) of his own and Ken is the Education Program Manager at the Bent of River Audubon (http://bentoftheriver.audubon.org/)in Southbury, CT). Both Greg and Ken are saying they were Savannah Sparrows that I saw.

So, I am going back there tomorrow to see if I can find them again. If I do, what a nice find for my Big Year and it would be another life bird for me!

Weather: 3:25-3:35; 29F; overcast; breezy

Since Greg and Ken both were so sure they were Savannah Sparrows, I am going to count them as #27 towards my Big Year.

Please note: I did not get a chance to post this on Thursday but I wanted to write it as if I did)