Lark Sparrow
Chondestes grammacus
Compiled by Yvonne Karnath
There is a moment most springs out at a Hill Country pasture — fence post, mesquite, a thin line of dirt road — when a sparrow drops down out of nowhere and lands in front of you, and you suddenly realize sparrows can be beautiful. Most of the “little brown birds” the average backyard birder dismisses really are little and really are brown. The Lark Sparrow is neither. It is large for a sparrow, long-tailed, and wears a face that, once you have seen it, you do not forget.
Cornell’s All About Birds calls the head pattern “distinctive,” which is the polite ornithological way of saying that no other songbird in Texas looks anything like it. Picture three bold colors painted onto a smooth gray-and-white sparrow: a chestnut crown split down the middle by a clean white stripe; a chestnut cheek patch outlined in black above and below; a white eyebrow and white whisker. Below, the bird is pale and unstreaked except for a single, neat black spot in the center of the breast — the same kind of stickpin mark that field guides love. Watch one fly off and you get the second giveaway, a long dark tail tipped with bright white corners, similar in flash to a towhee.
Texans get to enjoy this bird more than almost anyone else. The Texas Breeding Bird Atlas reports that Lark Sparrows breed across most of the state and reach their highest densities in the Rolling Plains, the South Texas Brush Country, and the Edwards Plateau — which is to say, the Hill Country we drive into every weekend. Across Central Texas the species is largely a year-round resident, with numbers swelling in spring as wintering birds and migrants pour in from farther south. They breed from early March through early September.
Habitat is half the secret to finding one. Lark Sparrows want open, semi-arid country with a little bit of structure — savannas dotted with mesquite or oak, weedy pasture edges, brushy fencerows, ranch roads with bare dirt shoulders, recently grazed or burned grasslands. They are the classic edge bird, neither fully a grassland species nor a brush species but something in between. They forage on the ground in the open and then bounce up to a perch — a fence wire, an exposed branch, the top of a yucca — when something startles them or when a male wants to sing.
Which brings up the courtship display, which is one of the strangest in North American songbirds. A male Lark Sparrow trying to impress a female on his territory will lower his wings until they brush the ground, spread his long tail wide so all those white corners are showing, and strut — there is really no other word for it — across the dirt for as long as five minutes at a stretch. Birds of the World describes it as “turkey-like,” and that is exactly the impression. The display ends, often as not, with the male picking up a small twig and presenting it to the female just before they mate. As far as anyone knows, this twig-passing is unique to the Lark Sparrow.
The song is the bird’s other charm. Where most sparrows give a short, mechanical trill or a few thin whistles, the Lark Sparrow opens up — a long, jumbled, melodious tumble of buzzes, trills, and clear whistles that has been compared, perhaps generously, to the song of European skylarks. Hence the name. Males sing from high perches in early morning and evening, sometimes again in the middle of the night during the breeding season, and a singing male in flight is one of the easier ways to pick the species up at a distance.
The diet is what you would expect for an open-country sparrow: seeds in fall and winter, a heavy shift to insects in the breeding season, with grasshoppers featuring prominently. Lark Sparrows almost always feed on the ground, often working slowly along bare patches and dirt roads where seed is exposed and grasshoppers are easy to chase down.
If you want to see one without leaving Travis County, the western half of the county is your friend. Commons Ford Ranch, Wild Basin Wilderness Preserve, the open areas around Hippie Hollow, the Balcones Canyonlands National Wildlife Refuge just over the county line, and the grassy edges out toward Pace Bend and Lake Travis all routinely host them from March onward. Closer to town, scan fence wires and bare ground at any old hayfield or pasture you can find legal access to. They are not subtle once you have them in view — that harlequin face shows up well in binoculars even at distance.
A nickname some birders use for this species is “the harlequin of the grasslands.” It is a fitting one. Among the brown crowd of meadowlarks, pipits, and other sparrows working a Texas pasture, the Lark Sparrow is the bird that arrives in costume.
Photo Credits: David Martin, Jenan Taha
Sources:
https://www.allaboutbirds.org
https://ebird.org
https://txtbba.tamu.edu/species-accounts/lark-sparrow/
https://www.audubon.org/field-guide/bird/lark-sparrow
