Good for a lark (part 2)

On my long road trip to Arizona, my first full day in the State was spent at the Sonoita Creek Preserve near Patagonia. After half a day of tromping the trails I returned to the parking lot and saw a few more birds I had never before seen - there were Say’s Phoebe and Green-tailed Towhee flitting about. And a large group of sparrows were picking through the gravel. Lark sparrows are very rare in the east (there are breeding records for Ontario, but not in successive years), but far more common on the Great Plains and into the Rockies.

But that wasn’t my first viewing of a Lark sparrow. Five or six years ago at Point Pelee in May I wandered into the Visitor Centre to hear about the rarities that I had missed. And, apparently, there was a Lark sparrow on the West Beach not 50 meters away. My impression of finding the bird was not its brightly coloured red and black head but rather the semi-circle of huge telephoto and telescope lenses that ringed one poor little bird, huddling miserably and lonely in a scraggly bush at the edge of the beach.

I don’t think there is any one reason for a decline in numbers of Lark sparrows. Sure, agricultural intensification and suburbanization play their parts as does the rate of fire (either too frequent or insufficiently frequent is not good for their numbers). Certain invasive plant species are not conducive to the sparrows’ preferred breeding habitat. And pesticide control of grasshoppers isn’t helping. Overall the population has dropped by 63% in my lifetime, but they still are measured at more than 7 million.