Cracked corn is still reasonably priced and is available in bags as large as fifty pounds. In the meantime, the best you can do to keep your sparrow happy is to scatter cracked corn or millet on the ground for it to scratch up.
They are also a bit restless, often staying around for a week or so before moving on. But the word on the street is that they tend to be loners and not found in flocks.
Other than that one garden visitor, Susan, I don’t have any firsthand experience with Fox Sparrows coming to my feeders. The soaring seed price resulted in too many people fighting the birds for the tossed floor sweepings. Unsurprisingly, these sweepings contained large amounts of spilled seed, including millet. What was the Fox Sparrow eating? We didn’t really have a feeder in that garden, but we did toss old floor sweepings back there. It was a treat to see the reclusive bird in an area that is typically inundated with the more urban House Sparrows. Instead, they would rather eat cracked corn or white millet.Ī few years ago, there was a Fox Sparrow digging in the garden behind our shop. That’s a little surprising considering much smaller birds such as chickadees, nuthatches and goldfinches can easily open the tough sunflower shells, but Fox Sparrows don’t seem to possess those skills. What seeds do they like? Typically, they avoid sunflower seeds if the sunflowers are still in the shells. Or, more accurately, they’ll visit the ground below backyard feeders, if those feeders happen to be near thick cover. But, if you’re lucky, they will occasionally visit backyard feeders. Instead of eating in open fields or along roadsides, Fox Sparrows forage under dense vegetation, especially near swamps and wetlands. They also tend to be more reclusive than some of their other sparrow cousins. Here in Massachusetts they are basically winter visitors, migrating south each fall from their breeding grounds in northern Ontario, Quebec and the Maritime Provinces. After grabbing leaf litter or soil with both feet, they will then kick the dirt backwards, like a dog that has just finished, um…doing what dogs do.Įven though they are common and widespread throughout the continent, finding a Fox Sparrow is not always easy. And like towhees, they habitually scratch while foraging. Nearly the size of a Hermit Thrush or towhee, the Fox Sparrow is noticeably larger than our other backyard sparrows.
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