Sparrows Simplified: Making Sense of the Little Brown Jobs

Michael Moore – President of the Delaware Ornithological Society
 

Many birders struggle with identifying sparrows, referring to them as LBJ’s (little brown jobs) or sparrow sp. This talk will help you tackle this difficult group. It will discuss and then attempt to blend the two main approaches to identification, the Peterson System and the Cape May School, to lead you to sparrow identification confidence. Each of the 16 species of regularly occurring sparrows in this area will be compared and contrasted with some discussion of finding and identifying rarities.

Mike is a recently retired Biology professor. He was at Arizona State University for 27 years and then at University of Delaware for 11 years before retiring a couple of years ago. He has published nearly 100 papers in scientific journals on behavior and hormones of birds and reptiles. He worked as an intern at Manomet Bird Observatory in Massachusetts in college and then completed a PhD in Zoology at the University of Washington on White-crowned Sparrows. He started birding in Massachusetts at 11 years old and has pursued it passionately since with a special interest in identification challenges and chasing rarities, splitting his field time between birds and his other passion, odonates. He is currently President of the Delaware Ornithological Society, a Vice President of the Dragonfly Society of the Americas and an eBIrd reviewer for Delaware.