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.