Song Sparrow - June 10th 2025

The idea of seeing a Song Sparrow was not only absent from my thinking this year, it was so far removed from any potential to see it that it hasn't made any of my "most wanted" scribbles.  Usually when other people are driving, I make lists of what I might see or what I'd like to see in the week, or month, or year.  I'm sure most people have a group of 5 or 10 (or 70...) birds they plan to try and see.  Song Sparrow is so uncommon on the UK mainland that I was 14 years old the last time I could have twitched one.  To say it wasn't on my radar is an insult to radar.

When one was photographed on the Sunday morning at Thornwick Bay on the Flamborough Head and subsequently not refound I had visions of a fruitless search for Alpine Accentor earlier in the year, and dismissed it from my thoughts.  Relegated to the depths of "not in my lifetime". I was on the way back from Maiden in Ayrshire where the Western Sandpiper had been a delight and wondered if the Song Sparrow would be seen again.

Monday was spent with flu symptoms, and no birding, so I loaded the car early on Tuesday with no expectation of anything other than a morning of trying to capture photos of Hobby on the Mosses.  News broke of the Song Sparrow and I U-turned at the entrance to Little Woolden and battled traffic to Flamborough.  I love Flam.  I have had a significant proportion of the best birds I've ever seen on that headland, from Taiga Flycatcher to Red-headed Bunting, from Two-barred Greenish Warbler to the Pale-legged Leaf Warbler at Bempton.  Joining the couple of hundred other birders who had variously rearranged work, feigned illness or simply run for it, I was greeted with the news that nobody wants to hear: was showing well ten minutes ago, but gone down now.

Half an hour of tense waiting in a crowd (which I dislike - they make me feel clumsy and self-conscious) and the Sparrow flitted over the top of the bramble patch in the gully at the side of the cafe at Thornwick.  At this point, fully three quarters of the crowd around where I was standing seemed to be on their phones.  WhatsApp, phone calls, bird apps, Merlin, photos of the crowd... only about a quarter of us were actively searching for the Sparrow.  This modern phenomenon had occurred to me a couple of times recently, where some good research using the phone was done at the wrong time and prevented me seeing the bird I was looking for.  I suppose it's a natural part of us wanting to fill our time the same way we do in lulls at work or home.  The problem is that our hobby demands attention on the environment around us, regardless of how boring it is.  Today there was a great range wildlife to see, but there seems to be a disconnect between the birders and the bird, when it isn't THE bird they came to see. The puffins, gannets, kittiwakes, fulmar, house martins, linnets, goldfinch, swallows, house sparrows, reed warblers and more there were largely ignored in favour of screen time.

Happily, everyone around me did get eyes on the Sparrow eventually,  but there was a real shock on the faces of some of the people that they had missed its first cameo and had to wait another 15 minutes to see it at all.  On another day, that's a missed bird.  When that bird is a Song Sparrow, that would be traumatic to say the least.

The singing of the Song Sparrow carried far today, and it was a pleasure to see the long tailed form of this American passerine in the nettles and long grass.  Such a stunning little bird, it's sometimes only when we spend time appreciating the Sparrows from elsewhere that we realise how beautiful our own Sparrows are.  My visit to the Moss later in the week will be a search for Tree Sparrow, in appreciation of what we have under our noses, if we can ditch the phone long enough to look.