The winter sparrows are beginning to arrive in Central Texas. The Harris’s Sparrow (Zonotrichia querula) regularly visits my bird feeders during the winter. The winter, non-breeding plumage adults have a black crown, black throat, and black streaked upper breast against a very white lower belly. The cheeks are a beautiful buffy-brown. The back and wings are brown with heaving black streaks. Wings have two white wingbars. The beak is pink. With a total length of 6.7 to 7.9 inches, the Harris sparrow is one of the largest sparrows. The oldest males have the largest bibs. Immature birds have less black.

The Harris sparrow breeds in the northern most parts of Canada in the boreal forests and tundra. It is unique because it is the only bird species that breeds in Canada and nowhere else in the world. Because of the remote areas where it nests, it was one of the last birds to have its eggs and nests found in Churchill, Manitoba by George M. Sutton in 1931. They migrate to the central Great Plains from South Dakota to southern Texas for the winter months.

The nests are on the ground in mossy depressions under shrubs. The nest is an open cup of mosses, small twigs, and lichens lined with dried grass and sometimes caribou hair. Nesting season is mid-June through early July. Clutch size is three to five eggs incubated for twelve to fifteen days. The eggs are pale green with irregular spots and blotches. The chicks hatch helpless with gray down. Both parents feed the chicks for eight to ten days. Both males and females often return to the same nesting area each year.

Harris sparrows eat a wide range of food during the year: berries in the spring, insects during the nesting season, and seeds during the winter. In my yard, they eat black oil sunflower seeds in my ground feeder and seem to love my bark butter with peanut butter, suet, cracked corn, and dried fruit.

In addition to being seen frequently at bird feeders, Harris sparrows favor edge situations where trees and brush edge pastures. Individual birds seem to return to the same areas each winter but more birds will spend the winter farther north in mild winters.

The Harris sparrow was named by famous ornithologist John James Audubon to honor Edward Harris (1799-1863). Harris was a farmer and an amateur naturalist who went on two expeditions with Audubon: spring of 1837 to the Gulf of Mexico and in 1843 along the Missouri River. He also provided funding for Audubon’s publication, Birds of America. Two other birds bear his name – the Harris’s Hawk, Parabuteo unicinctus and the Buff-fronted Owl, Aegolisu harrisii