Everyone is in trouble now that I'm back at the computer!!  A little more
than two years ago Jill and I moved into our house in the country.  We set
up a couple bird feeders and even after three weeks that first fall we
didn't have a single bird.  We have almost no cover near the house (we're
in corn/soy fields) and I was actually excited to see my first House
Sparrow!  Now--two years later we had close to 200 birds at the feeders
this past snow, including 65+ Horned Larks and 12-13 White-crowned
Sparrows.  The White-crowns interested me because Dr. Ingersoll, a former
Zoology prof, had a son that once did a White-crowned banding project at
their feeders in Oxford and banded nearly 100 individuals! Some of these
birds returned yearly from the Arctic for up to six years!  I banded an
afternoon at the feeder and was successful in banding 4 hatch year and 2
adult White-crowneds.  To my surprise one of the adults was from our
standard eastern Canadian tundra and nominate race, leucophrys, but the
other was from the Alaska to Hudson Bay race, gambelii.  From the following
photos you can distinguish the two races relatively easily.  Gambelii has a
whitish supraloral (between bill and eye) region and a smaller
orange-yellow bill; leucophrys has a black line between the eye and the
bill and a larger pinkish bill. This is only the second gambelii
White-crowned I've seen in this area, the first five or six years ago at
our feeder in Oxford--does anyone else have experience with gambelii in
this area?
Dave