For Birders

[iris lilies]

This article talks about a kind of sparrow that was introduced in my neighborhood and has hung around here for 140 years, not spreading more than 150 milea away.

Are there many sub species of sparrow in the U.S., ones like thos located within a very narrow geographic area?


http://lafayettesquare.org/1870-the-bird-that-stayed-in-lafayette-square/

[razz]

That is news to me about sparrows. Was there not a controversy about Orioles that were unique to an area?

[dado potato]

The Florida subspecies of the Grasshopper Sparrow nests on the ground on treeless prairie. The range at present is limited to the Kissimmee Prairie Preserve State Park and the Three Lakes Wildlife Management Area. I believe it is the bird in greatest danger of extinction in the USA. Nesting on the ground had a high failure rate all along, but the arrival of the venomous red imported fire ant made the chances of survival much worse.

The Audubon Society has run a number of articles about the effort to capture specimens of the Florida grasshopper sparrow and breed them in captivity.
http://www.audubon.org/news/say-hello-first-florida-grasshopper-sparrows-born-captivity