BN, that was really great description/comparison between the two. Thanks much for your input. Think you, Jan, and beegood are right on about it being a song sparrow! -mxyplx, maybe a new prescription is in order??? ;-) This guy isn't a Junco, but don't you just love those little guys? Never used to have them (or at least see them) around this particular area until a few years ago. Now they are all over the place and I am very glad of it! Think the ones around here may be the Oregon Junco... CMK

Yes, that is very probable. I just didn't see the yellow on the tail tip, but there was a lot of light behind them, making color details difficult. We have seen the adults this summer but never saw a young one before. We've had lots of various juveniles this year. ID is often difficult when going by just pictures in a bird book. Heck, even adults are tough. Right now we're getting all the visitors that are going south. Why do they always pick a bare branch with sky for background, making fine details next to impossible? My camera is 10-15+ years old and not worth fixing. I'm looking into something ideal for back yard bird watching but haven't found it yet. This forum is wonderful but only as good as my descriptions and observation skills. A good picture would speak volumes, not to mention putting it on my computer and enlarging it so I can see it close up. My binoculars are 10-42 and work pretty well, but once they fly, well.....opportunity is lost. Plus, the 10 is tough to find and track bouncing birds.

Hi Rachel, Sorry - I live in eastern Massachusetts, 7 miles north of Boston and I live in a suburb with a little wooded area bordering my backyard, and a wildlife reservation and ponds about 1/2 a mile away (I am very fortunate!). It has been very cold here the last few days and we got our first dusting of snow yesterday. I have seen different kinds of birds here within a mile of the house - woodpeckers, hawks, swans, geese, the common feeder birds, we even have a heron who flies back and forth over our neighborhood every day - so we do get a variety of birds. We definitely do have house sparrows, but these little guys I saw yesterday were not those. They were just about a solid brown from where I could see. No striping or definitive marks. They just hopped around eating stray sunflower seeds. I've gone through photos of species, both genders and juvenile appearances, on the internet and in my books, and I am not sure what this bird was. The only even remote possibilities I could come up with were: field sparrow; junco; and female indigo bunting. If you have thoughts on this I would be most appreciative. Thanks, Donna P.S. Your last set of photos was, as always, astounding. Congrats on your new lifer!

There were flowering plants there in the past, before the herbivores found them. It's a good thing, because they can't spread any further if they can't make seeds. The BONAP map shows them in Ohio, but not Michigan, so they are on the move northward. Shade might be affecting the flowering too? Sylvestris smells like parsley. Caucalis smells like licorice, but the internet doesn't have much info about caucalis, because sylvestris gets all the attention.