You’re probably hearing parent birds encouraging their young to leave the nest. In late spring or summer, you might wonder what all the fuss is about if you hear a couple of house sparrows carrying on with insistent cheeping for several hours near a nest. The female may begin laying eggs again only eight days after the young have left. The young stay in the nest for another two weeks, and then leave the nest and follow a parent – often the male – around for a week or so. The female usually lays about five eggs, which the pair incubates for about two weeks. The birds in a pair tend to stay together and raise as many as four broods in a season. (One way to help avoid such conflicts is to place bluebird boxes far from buildings.) House sparrows are known for attacking and even killing bluebirds, tree sparrows, or house wrens, and for pecking their eggs, in order to take over a nest box. One thing that makes house sparrows unpopular – or even hated – is their aggression toward other birds, such as bluebirds, over nest boxes. You might even find a nest in a bluebird box, because house sparrows are small enough to enter the 1-1/2 inch hole that keeps larger hole-seeking birds (such as starlings) out.Ī female house sparrow. They occasionally nest among bush or tree branches, or in vines on the side of a building. They like to nest in protected spaces in buildings or other human structures, so their nests aren’t easy to see. House sparrows typically build a somewhat ball-shaped nest with a messy cup and a roof (as in our photo). What is a house sparrow nest like? It’s a bit different from most nests around here. House sparrows are quite social and often nest near one another, so you might notice comings and goings around a nest area. Unlike most of our birds, house sparrows may use their nests throughout the winter as a place to stay warm or spend the night. The bird is probably already building or refurbishing a nest. If you spent time in a backyard, playground, park, or schoolyard while growing up, their plain, simple “cheep” song was probably part of the background noise to your childhood.Īt this time of year, as the breeding season approaches, you might spot a house sparrow carrying some grass-like material as it flies to a crevice on a building, or disappears behind a store’s sign or inside a streetlight or utility box. You’re probably familiar with their repetitive but distinctive “cheep, cheep, cheep.” It might come from a bird – probably male – perched on a roof or branch, or from a flock of house sparrows sheltering unseen in a dense bush. They eat seeds year-round, but they also go after insects in the breeding season to get extra protein for egg-laying and feeding chicks. We hardly notice house sparrows as they hop around on the ground near picnic tables, hunting for crumbs and dropped food, but they’re more obvious in numbers, as when a flock arrives at a bird feeder and the ground underneath it. Sometimes called English sparrows due to their European origins, these little brown birds are often controversial or even unpopular, but they can be fun to watch. Thanks to their numbers and their habit of living year-round near people and buildings, house sparrows ( Passer domesticus) can be relatively easy to observe as they go about their lives. The same can be said of all the other months of the year. But no matter what this month is like, chances are good that you’ll find house sparrows nearby. February can bring us the worst of winter (such as minus-10 degree weather), the beginnings of spring (such as 50 degree weather), or a bit of both (as when we get both extremes in the same week).
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