Sparrows

When I started taking photos of birds, I knew very little of sparrows. The only one I’d known from before was the House Sparrow, ubiquitous in my time in England although now in decline there, but that turned out to not really be a sparrow so it’s not in this section but with the finches. My first “new” sparrow was the Song Sparrow, a bird of which I’ve taken entirely too many photos. A Chipping Sparrow showed up in the street one day and introduced me to a wider world. White-throats came next, one of our most prolific winter visitors. Savannah Sparrows were oddly elusive for a number of years, and then I discovered that some members of the Sparrow species don’t have “sparrow” in their names.

After flailing around for a “sensible” organization of this family of birds, I have chosen to present them in the order in which I photographed them once I was using DSLR cameras in 2010.