Now here's a species that is normally overlooked, given how common it is; glad this week's SMAP puts them in the spotlight!
Sparrows it is! Although we normally think of sparrow as one species, there are actually several species of them. In Portugal we can see four different species, although the house sparrow is by far the most common.
Males and females are very easy to tell apart: see the difuse black spot coming down the throat to the chest? Males have them, females don't: that easy!
Their cheeks are white or grey. Here, i don't know if they had been feeding recently and got their faces dirty, or if it was the fact that I took these photos near the golden hour, as the sun was already quite low, and changed the colours a little bit. They did look great in this light, though!
A few meters where this photo was taken, another male was resting from all the chirping, sun shining right into his face.
Look at the colour difference from this photo I took a few years ago, in a rural setting:
Snowy white cheeks!
It's not uncommon seeing sparrows perch in a resting position, withouth their legs straight; in the fence from the second photo, several male sparrows were perching, some chirping like crazy, others just chilling out: so it was easy to spot different perching positions.
Notice the different cheeks again?
This one was really into finding a girlfriend, he couldn't stop chirping!
The photos at the fence were taken just a few dozen meters from my house. A couple days ago I decided to do a little urban birdwatching, and it's amazing the amount of species present, even with very limited garden space around. I was able to photograph 5 different species, and seen a couple more that I wasn't able to capture on camera, in just a few minutes! Just goes to show that if we pay attention, we might realise that there is far more biodiversity around us at all times than we would think possible; but that will be a subject for another post... don't wan't to rob any protagonism to these little everpresent guys!
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