Black-throated Sparrow

About the Black-throated Sparrow

The sharpest-dressed sparrow in the desert: soft gray above, clean white below, with a jet-black throat framed by two bold white face stripes. Where most sparrows ask for careful study, this one identifies itself across fifty yards of creosote.

Black-throated Sparrows are true desert birds, at home on the driest, stoniest ground Texas offers. They can live for long stretches without drinking at all, wringing the water they need from seeds and insects - one of the adaptations that lets them sing from an ocotillo in July heat that has silenced everything else.

The song is a sweet, tinkling phrase, delivered from a low perch with the head thrown back, and in spring a desert slope can carry a dozen singers at once. Pairs nest low in thorny shrubs, trusting the armament of cholla and catclaw to do the guarding.

They range across the western half of the state, east to the Hill Country's dry western edges. Find a rocky slope with scattered scrub, wait through one verse of song, and the white face stripes will flash from the top of a bush.