For Wisconsin birders, this is one cooperative and thoughtful bird, not to mention extremely rare around these parts.
For a week now, a golden-crowned sparrow — a bird almost never seen in Wisconsin — has been drawing birders from around the state to Middleton.
Thousands of miles from its normal West Coast winter haunts, the bird showed up at perhaps the very best place it could have picked to create a stir in the local birding world — Eagle Optics, the Middleton binocular store where birding enthusiast Mike McDowell works.
Last Monday, McDowell's attention was drawn to a sparrow-like bird hopping and scratching to get at snow-buried seeds on a feeder outside the store window.
"I reached for a pair of binoculars," recalled McDowell. "We have lots of them. And I shouted out that it was a golden-crowned sparrow. Nobody in the store believed me."
After confirming that it was indeed a bird rarely seen in the state, McDowell posted a note on his Facebook page. His phone started ringing and a migration of birders began. The first to show up was Tom Prestby, a Madison birder and photographer who left his job to race to Eagle Optics.
"How crazy is that?" marveled Prestby. "Of all the places it could have shown up, it's at a birding optics store."
Since last Monday, more than 100 people, including some very serious birders, have come to the store to see the bird and add it to their life lists. They've come from Chicago and Milwaukee and from all over Wisconsin. A birder from Pennsylvania was visiting Madison and came by to add the bird to his list.
The last time a golden-crowned sparrow was recorded in Wisconsin was Nov. 26, 1992, to April 18, 1993, in Sheboygan, according to records kept by the Wisconsin Ornithological Society. Prior to that were sightings in the 1960s in Bayfield and in the mid-1800s in Racine.
Normally, the golden-crowned sparrow nests in Alaska and British Columbia and winters south along the coast from Washington to California. How it ended up in Wisconsin is a subject of much speculation at the store, McDowell said. Perhaps it became mixed with a flock of southbound sparrows in Alaska that ended up taking an easterly route. Or maybe tough weather blew if far off course.
But the mysterious nature of that journey is what makes the tiny bird, known as a "vagrant" in birding circles, so fascinating.
"A vagrant is a very, very cherished thing," said McDowell. "It's hundreds and hundreds of miles off course."
For McDowell, the sparrow was his first new bird since 2006. "A genuine life bird," he noted on his blog, "Right at work!"
