Jewel of the juncos

Bird names have changed a lot in the 40-plus years I have been birding. For the most part, that is because our ideas about what constitutes a bird species have been changing.

The original field guide I used was published in 1961. It listed Baltimore and Bullock’s orioles as two separate species. In a 1983 guide I have, the two had been lumped into a single species, the northern oriole. In current guides, the two orioles are again separate species.

It’s not that ornithologists in charge of naming bird species are fickle; it’s that our understanding of the birds’ biology changes with the more we learn.

In my birding lifetime, a few species, such as the orioles, have been lumped and a lot more have been divided into multiple species. Examples of the former are Audubon’s and Myrtle’s warblers lumped into yellow-rumped warbler; yellow-shafted and red-shafted flickers into northern flicker and four sparrow species into one species of junco.

At the time of the changes, 1973 for all these groups, I was sad to see the old names go. For one it meant fewer species on my life list. For another the old names seemed more colorful, especially with the flickers.

The warbler and the oriole also represented a trend away from naming birds after people in an attempt to make bird names more descriptive. Thus we were given yellow-rumped warbler. However, such name changes can be, a real pain in the – uh, well – rump.

Take a look at juncos as a case in point. Junco is a bird name that will recall different visual images for different people in different parts of the country. The common name for the species in most of North America is dark-eyed junco – neither an outstanding nor imaginative name until you compare it with that for the other junco found in the United States, the yellow-eyed junco.

The different images I referred to reflect the diversity of the species throughout its range. Juncos are found from Alaska to Florida, from New Brunswick to Baja, Calif., and from the edge of the Arctic Circle down through the mountains of Mexico.

This species we now call dark-eyed junco, has, in the past, been divided into as many as seven different species, with seven different names, in seven different parts of the junco range. Prior to the 1973 lumping, this number had been whittled down to four.

Each species was distinct enough in appearance that still each group that was a species is identifiable in the field – and with greater degrees of identifiable difference than there are among whole groups of other species, such as the Empidonax flycatchers.

The four juncos that were lumped to form the dark-eyed junco in 1973 and 1982 were the slate-colored, white-winged, gray-headed – all nicely descriptive names – and the Oregon. Having grown up and birded exclusively in Oregon prior to 1973, I took it rather personally when the Oregon name was demoted.

Since we are speaking of names, you might wish to ask where the name junco came from. It’s not a sparrow-sounding name at all. Don’t ask, however. It makes no sense. The root word from which junco is derived is “juncus,” which is the name for a group of plants, the reeds. Juncos and reeds have nothing to do with one another. Neither eats nor spends time with the other. It’s a mystery, but one I don’t need to understand. I like the name.

As I mentioned before, juncos are unique sparrows. As a group, sparrows are usually thought of as those brown-striped little birds that are too difficult to tell apart. Not so with juncos. While young juncos are striped and brown their first few months of life and do look rather like vesper sparrows, adult juncos are decidedly unsparrowlike.

The junco of our area, both in nesting and winter seasons, is of the Oregon group. It is most distinctive with a black-cowled head, a rusty-red back and pinkish-brown sides. As do all of the dark-eyed juncos, the Oregon has a sparrowlike but pink beak. It also shares with other juncos a tail strikingly outlined in white.

In breeding season, Oregon juncos are found anywhere from northwestern British Columbia south through the Pacific Northwest, into central California, and throughout the mountainous Inland Northwest. They winter in the western states and into northern Mexico.

The predominant junco of the dark-eyed species is, however, a winter gem that both hardy outdoor birders and patient indoor feeder-watchers in North Idaho are looking for. That is the slate-colored junco. Told easily from Oregon by its lack of a hood and its uniformly gray back and sides, it is the junco species of Canada and the eastern United States.

The slate-coloreds are, quite frankly, the plainest of the juncos. So what sets them apart as an Inland Northwest winter gem? It is, you see, their rareness that makes them attractive. If it’s rare enough, a gem need not be gorgeous to be appreciated.

If you travel just about anywhere in the coniferous or hardwood forests of Alaska, Canada, the Great Lakes, New England, or the Appalachians in spring or summer, you’ll likely find slate-colored juncos. They are abundant in such areas.

Similarly, if you travel through any open woods or brushy areas in the eastern United States in winter, you’ll see an abundance of slate-colored juncos. Also, look beneath almost any winter feeder in any eastern town, and there they will be, picking seeds from the ground. By far the majority of dark-eyed juncos are of the slate-colored variety – except, not here, or anywhere in the West.

Oregon juncos, on the other hand, will be found in similar sorts of places in the West, be it winter, spring, summer or fall. Around here, they’ll typically be nesting at elevations higher than most towns, but in winter they move down from the north and down from the heights, to feed where grounded seeds are less likely to be buried in deep snow.

How rare a gem are the dull eastern juncos? Based on Christmas bird count data from many years in Coeur d’Alene and this year in the Lewiston/Clarkston area, in every flock of 100 juncos, there should be 2.5 slate-coloreds.

Understand, though, that although juncos do move as flocks in winter, they are usually fairly small flocks that are often mixed with chickadees, nuthatches and kinglets. And these small flocks tend to follow a circuit in their foraging travels. Thus it takes a lot of looking to sift out those occasional, misplaced trinkets.

Even though juncos are a flocking species, you can’t exactly call them gregarious. They do, in fact, show subtle signs of depression, I think. They are relatively uncaring about human approach on the one hand, but are downright hostile to members of their own flock, which is often small, and is based on a rigid pecking order.

Females are generally thought to avoid the particularly grumpy males by migrating farther south. Lots of room for anthropomorphizing there – seasonal affective disorder, perhaps?

At rest, individuals often skulk off alone. One observer deduced “an internal drive to be alone,” with individuals seemingly more relaxed, oddly, away from the flock.

And while other species prefer height in most of their daily pursuits, juncos favor the ground and its dark shadows in all things, including nesting and feeding. Only in alarm do they take to the branches of trees or shrubs.

So, now is the time to be carefully examining those busy little flocks hopping beneath your feeders, or chipping noisily through the woods. Find the slate gray prize if you can, but it’s still the black-hooded little junco with its browns in rusts and pinks that remains the jewel for me. And by me, it will always be called the Oregon junco – no matter what the field guides may call it.