Olive Sparrow

About the Olive Sparrow

The Olive Sparrow is the sparrow of the South Texas thorn forest - a plain, chunky, olive-green-backed bird with a grayish face and breast and two dull brown stripes on the crown. There is nothing flashy about it, and that is the point: it is a skulker, far more often heard than seen.

It stays low in the densest brush, scratching in the leaf litter for seeds and insects with both feet like a towhee, and reveals itself with a song of clear notes that starts slowly and speeds up into a bouncing-ball trill. Patient birders learn to sit near a water drip and let it come to them.

In Texas the Olive Sparrow is a year-round resident of the Rio Grande Valley and the brush country north to about the Coastal Bend and Hill Country edge. It reaches the United States only in South Texas, making it a required stop on any Valley birding list.