“It’s just a sparrow.” 

Bird enthusiasts hear and use that phrase a lot this time of year. 

Every October here in Maine, we are inundated with sparrows. Just about every weedy field, roadside and backyard is busy with a flock of sparrows. 

The word sparrow by itself can describe any one of hundreds of species around the world, including even some that are unrelated to each other: the familiar (though non-native) house sparrow that lives around our towns and cities is actually of the old world sparrow family and is completely unrelated to our native new world sparrow family. 

It gets even more interesting when you discover that the new world sparrow family contains not just “sparrows” but birds like towhees and juncos.

While it is true that most of the species that carry the name “sparrow” sport some shade of brown in their plumage, that doesn’t mean, as some people seem to think, that they are by definition drab-colored birds. 

For example, take the white-crowned sparrow that nests in the Canadian taiga to our north and passes south through Maine at this time of year. In adult plumage, the white and black stripes on the head of this bulky sparrow are strikingly bold, accentuated with a pinkish bill. 

The even larger fox sparrow is a mix of bright rusty red and battleship gray. The tiny, short-tailed savannah sparrow has a yellow eyebrow. The seldom-seen vesper sparrow has a white eye-ring, white sides on its tail, and a reddish patch on the bend of its wing. That last feature was immortalized in one of the most charming of the old-fashioned names for the species, the bay-winged bunting. 

One of the most common sparrows at this time of year is the white-throated sparrow. Like the white-crowned sparrow, the familiar form of this species has bold black-and-white head stripes (accented with some yellow in front of the eye) but also a white throat and a black, rather than pink, bill. 

There are very likely millions of white-throated sparrows that pass through Maine from points north every fall, with their high, thin “seet” notes issuing from just about every brush pile and shrubby edge in the state. They also nest throughout Maine. 

For us and many others, their beautiful whistled song, sounding like some variation of “Old Sam Peabody Peabody Peabody” or as our Canadian friends like to say, “Oh Sweet Canada Canada Canada” is one of the most beloved and familiar sounds of summer. 

Along the coast at this time of year, avid birders also scour sparrow flocks for the occasional rarity that could show up from farther west or south. Monhegan Island is especially well known as a magnet for rare or uncommon sparrow species in late September and October, where it is not unlikely that more westerly species like clay-colored sparrow and lark sparrow can occur. 

We once took a winter ferry out to Cliff Island off Portland to see a very rare golden-crowned sparrow, a species that normally winters along the Pacific Coast from southern British Columbia to California.

Even if you’re not particularly interested in learning how to tell a Lincoln’s sparrow from a song sparrow, we encourage you to stop and take a look a closer look at those flocks of migrating sparrows passing through your backyard today. If you do, you may find yourself never using the phrase “it’s just a sparrow” ever again.

Dr. Jeff Wells is the senior scientist for the Boreal Songbird Initiative. During his time at the famed Cornell Lab of Ornithology and as the Audubon Society's national bird conservation director, Dr. Wells earned a reputation as one of the nation's leading bird experts and conservation biologists. Jeff's grandfather, the late John Chase, was a columnist for the Boothbay Register for many years. Allison Childs Wells, also formerly of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is a widely published natural history writer and a senior director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine. Together, they have been writing and teaching people about birds for decades. The Maine natives are authors of the highly acclaimed book, “Maine's Favorite Birds.”