Cassin's Sparrow

About the Cassin's Sparrow

Cassin's Sparrow is a bird you hear before you see - a plain, grayish, softly streaked grassland sparrow with almost no field marks, best known for its skylarking song flight. The male flutters up from a shrub, sets his wings, and floats back down on a long, sweet, trilling song, over and over across the prairie on spring and summer evenings.

On the ground it is a skulker of open country with scattered mesquite, yucca, and shrubs, feeding on seeds and insects and vanishing into the grass when approached. Cassin's Sparrows are famously nomadic, appearing and breeding wherever rains have greened the grassland, sometimes far outside their usual range in wet years and absent in drought.

In Texas, Cassin's Sparrow is a summer breeder across the western two-thirds of the state, from the Hill Country and coastal prairies west through the Panhandle and Trans-Pecos, with birds staying year-round in the south. Its song flight is one of the signature sounds of a Texas grassland at dusk.