Easily Confused

It's not you, it's me. How can I be confused by something as simple as a sparrow? "That's not a sparrow", you may well be thinking. Well, yes and no. This is another example of me having to revise my vocabulary when I left home and had to engage with the mainstream. Until that point, this was a 'hedge sparrow' - shy, retiring, unobtrusive, unremarkable bird that, unlike 'real' sparrows, did not 'steal' grain, so was not 'vermin' and game for pot shots with a shotgun

Real sparrows, 'house sparrows' as I now know, were the most common bird in my life, sitting on every rooftop, on the girders under every barn roof, pecking around feeding troughs, quarreling in trees and hedges, taking ripening grain from the crops in the field. Hedge sparrows were relatively rare by comparison. (How times have changed). When the village school taught us the bible verses that sparrows were sold two for a penny, we knew exactly which sparrows Jesus was talking about

But most of the world calls this a 'Dunnock', and it took me a while to work out that dunnock and hedge sparrow are the same bird. And it has no relationship to a sparrow. It belongs to a genus in which every other member is called some kind of 'Accentor' - most of them from high or remote places. There is an Alpine accentor, a Mongolian accentor and a Siberian accentor, and eight others. The dunnock is the black sheep of the family, living an easy life in the lowlands. Unlike sparrows, it mostly eats small arthropods that it finds on the ground. It will eat small seeds - it feeds daintily under the bird table, but never on it. It's actually pretty unusual to find one perching out in the ooen like this

Then someone told me about 'tree sparrows'. "Do you mean a hedge sparrow?" "No, that's a dunnock, I mean a tree sparrow". More confusion. I've read about them now. To be honest, if I've ever seen a tree sparrow, I've probably assumed it was a house sparrow. Unless you are looking for the differences, they look very similar. Strangely both sexes look like a male house sparrow - they do not have sexual dimorphism

Another oddity about dunnocks: they are territorial, but territories may overlap in strange ways. This can result in multiple males fertilising the eggs in a single clutch and all of them helping to raise the brood. But the reverse can also happen, with a single male territory covering multiple females. A territory containing multiple males and females can also happen. It confuses me, but the dunnocks seem ok with it