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Swamp Sparrow

Status Fairly common in summer, rare in winter. Breeds. Migrants first arrive in April (average 15 April, earliest 6 April) but are most commonly reported in May. In summer it is locally common throughout the province in suitable habitat such as wet, marshy areas with thick growths of reeds or other dank vegetation. Fall migration is most evident in late September to mid-October, but latest migrants cannot be distinguished from those few that intend to winter. Estimates of 12-23 birds have been made on five Halifax East Christmas Bird Counts since 1973. Small numbers seem to survive through winter, occasionally at feeders, but 20 around Russell Lake, Dartmouth, on 25 January 1983 were unusual.

Description Length: 13-14 cm. Adults: Crown chestnut; dark line behind eye and light line over it; back reddish brown, broadly streaked with black; side of neck slate-coloured; rump light brown; throat and belly white; flanks buffy brown; breast gray and unstreaked.

Breeding Nest: Composed of coarse weed stems with lining of fine soft grass, placed among weeds or low bushes in wet or marshy ground. It is sometimes fastened to the stems of cattails or other coarse water plants, a few inches above water. Eggs: 4; bluish white, well speckled, blotched and washed with rufous. Laying begins during the second week in May. A nest found on 18 May contained four slightly incubated eggs and was lined with soft grass and fastened to the stems of coarse weeds about 30 cm above ground in a bushy swale near Wolfville. Another nest at Albany contained four fresh eggs on 22 May 1925; it was located on the margin of a sluggish stream, fastened to weed stems and slightly above ground. A rather late date for fresh eggs is 28 May 1905, when a set of four was examined near Wolfville. The nest was in a cattail swamp, fastened to the stalks, about 20 cm above water. The exterior was rough but the lining was of very fine grasses.

Range Breeds from southwestern Mackenzie Valley, northern Manitoba, central Quebec, and Newfoundland, south to New Jersey, West Virginia and northeastern North Dakota. Winters from the southern part of its breeding range to the Gulf Coast and Texas.

Remarks Good field marks for this bird at close range are its dark chestnut crown patch; gray, unstreaked breast; and dark appearance. The Chipping Sparrow has similar marks, but the Swamp Sparrow is more robust and lacks the black line through the eye and white one above that the Chipping Sparrow displays; furthermore, the habitats of these two birds are very different. When in juvenile plumage, it is readily mistaken for Lincoln's Sparrow. As its name suggests, this bird is at home in swampy places, especially those where cattails flourish.

Its song is a rapid, monotonous repetition of tweet-tweet-tweet, and may be confused with those of other sparrows.

Melospiza georgiana georgiana is the summer resident that breeds here. Melospiza georgiana ericrypta, a more northerly race (described by Oberholser in 1938), occurs here as a transient with unknown frequency. W. Earl Godfrey collected four specimens of this bird on Cape Breton Island in 1935: three at Cape North, Victoria County (one each on 5, 6 and 11 September), and one at Margaree Valley, Inverness County, on 6 October. One also was taken at East Lawrencetown, Halifax County, on 15 February 1957 by Charles R.K. Allen. It may be that all or most wintering Swamp Sparrows belong to this second subspecies; the two races are indistinguishable in life.