Voice of the Wild

This is Illinois Extension’s Voice of the Wild. A new wild voice in just a moment, so find someplace quiet, take a deep breath, and enjoy.

My Christmas bird count doesn’t feel complete until my friends and I find the local flock of these handsome winter visitors. We search for them in an old weedy hedgerow next to the university's arboretum, but they can be found starting in October flocking in a variety of undisturbed brushy habitats. They’ll visit neighborhoods too, just as long as there is some good cover and few feeders around. Their song is a sweet whistle followed by a pleasant buzz. Unlike most other sparrows, they’re almost as easy to identify by sight as they are by sound. They have a crisp striped crown - the females alternating rusty brown with gray, and the males black with white.

This is the white-crowned sparrow (Zonotrichia leucophrys) from the family of new-world sparrows, Passerellidae. The White-crowned sparrow learns its song from the others in its flock. Because of this, they develop regional dialects. At the beginning of the episode I played a song which I felt was closest to what I usually hear in central Illinois - I’ll play that song again, but with a few others from different parts of the US. If you’d like to hear more of those dialects, check out the link in the description to a few more of Cornell's recordings.

Thank you to the Macaulay library at the Cornell lab for our bird sounds. And thank you for tuning in to learn a new wild voice with Illinois Extension.