Zonotricia Sparrows

So I combined the Rufus-collared with the rest to form an illustration of all five Zonotrichia.  Now it's on to the next project which is the Black-backed Woodpecker. 

6 x 13 inches, Mixed media on paper,  $175

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birdartist@mindspring.com

My favorite Sparrow.

I went birding with my friend Howard Horvath and several other friends on Wednesday, an outing  we do about every week.  Howard, who has birded all over the world, mentioned that I had forgotten the only other Zonotrichia sparrow, the Rufus-collared Sparrow.  So I did some research and may have discovered my favorite sparrow!  I find this little guy to be a stunning bird.  I would love to hear him sing because typically Zonotrichia sparrows have wonderful songs.  The range of this bird is southern Mexico all the way to the tip of South America, Terra del Fuego.   This is mostly neo-tropical habitat so Howard speculates that the reason we don’t see an occasional vagrant here in North America may be the separation of a fairly large arid desert between the tropics and this continent.  So of course I had to add the final bird to the Zonotrichia illustration that I started on Monday. 

My first painting of the new year...

is a portrait of four of my favorite sparrows.  Birders are like every other collector, we like to collect rare additions to our collection which in our case is a bird sighting.  One of the subsets of rare sightings is to see all of a certain genus that range in North America.  To see them in one day is sometimes referred to as a Grand Slam.

In the Sparrow family, there is a genus Zonotrichia that has four representatives in North America, Harris's, Golden-crowned, White-crowned, and White-throated, (as depicted).  They all winter in Oregon, White-crowned and Golden-crowned in good numbers and White-throated and Harris’s in very small numbers, usually making their sightings worthy of note.  In Central Oregon, we only see one or two Harris’s in a winter, sometimes none. White-throated show up a little more often maybe a half dozen sightings in a winter.  White-throated are more common in winter on the west side of the Cascade Mountains.  These sparrows are some of the larger sparrows and in my opinion, some of the more hansom. 

Recently we have had all four Zonotrichia in Deschutes County so the Zonotrichia Grand Slam has been doable.  I have not yet seen them all in the same day, however,  this nevertheless set me to painting a representation of all four in breeding plumage.