New World sparrows are a group of mainly New World
passerine
A passerine () is any bird of the order Passeriformes (; from Latin 'sparrow' and '-shaped'), which includes more than half of all bird species. Sometimes known as perching birds, passerines are distinguished from other orders of birds by th ...
birds, forming the family Passerellidae. They are seed-eating
bird
Birds are a group of warm-blooded vertebrates constituting the class Aves (), characterised by feathers, toothless beaked jaws, the laying of hard-shelled eggs, a high metabolic rate, a four-chambered heart, and a strong yet lightweig ...
s with conical bills, brown or gray in color, and many species have distinctive head patterns.
Although they share the name sparrow, New World sparrows are more closely related to Old World
buntings
The buntings are a group of Old World passerine birds forming the genus ''Emberiza'', the only genus in the family Emberizidae. The family contains 45 species. They are seed-eating birds with stubby, conical bills.
Taxonomy
The family Ember ...
than they are to the
Old World sparrows (family Passeridae). New World sparrows are also similar in both appearance and habit to
finches, with which they sometimes used to be classified.
Taxonomy
The genera now assigned to the family Passerellidae were previously included with the buntings in the family
Emberizidae. A
phylogenetic
In biology, phylogenetics (; from Greek φυλή/ φῦλον [] "tribe, clan, race", and wikt:γενετικός, γενετικός [] "origin, source, birth") is the study of the evolutionary history and relationships among or within groups ...
analysis of nuclear and
mitochondrial DNA sequences published in 2015 found that the Passerellidae formed a
monophyletic
In cladistics for a group of organisms, monophyly is the condition of being a clade—that is, a group of taxa composed only of a common ancestor (or more precisely an ancestral population) and all of its lineal descendants. Monophyletic gr ...
group that had an uncertain relationship to the Emberizidae. Emberizidae was therefore split and the family Passerellidae resurrected.
It had originally been introduced, as the subfamily Passerellinae, by the German ornithologist
Jean Cabanis
Jean Louis Cabanis (8 March 1816 – 20 February 1906) was a German ornithologist.
Cabanis was born in Berlin to an old Huguenot family who had moved from France. Little is known of his early life. He studied at the University of Berlin from 1 ...
in 1851.
The
International Ornithological Congress (IOC) recognizes 138 species in the family, distributed among these 30 genera. For more detail, see
list of New World sparrow species
The International Ornithological Committee (IOC) recognizes these 138 species in the New World sparrow family Passerellidae, distributed among 30 genera in the following sequence. One extinct species, the Bermuda towhee, is included. Confusingly, ...
.
Passerellidae
Below is a phylogeny based on a 2016 study by Bryson and colleagues.
Morphology
Being a member of
Emberizoidea
Emberizoidea is a superfamily of passerines that are referred to as the New World nine-primaried oscines that includes majority of endemics which are exclusive to the New World. Nearly 892 species belong to this group as it includes buntings, A ...
, New World sparrows have only nine easily visible
primary feathers on each wing (they also have a 10th primary, but it is greatly reduced and largely concealed).
Despite their name, not all of the New World sparrows resemble the typical image of a sparrow. Species in the
neotropics tend to be much larger with bold patterns of greens, reds, yellows, and grays. Those in the
Nearctic realm
The Nearctic realm is one of the eight biogeographic realms constituting the Earth's land surface.
The Nearctic realm covers most of North America, including Greenland, Central Florida, and the highlands of Mexico. The parts of North America t ...
are smaller, with brown bodies streaked and with some head patterns.
Some even have
sexual dimorphism
Sexual dimorphism is the condition where the sexes of the same animal and/or plant species exhibit different morphological characteristics, particularly characteristics not directly involved in reproduction. The condition occurs in most an ...
such as the
lark bunting and
eastern towhee.
Habitat and distribution
The New World sparrows are found throughout in the Americas, from their breeding ranges in the Arctic
tundra of North America to their year-round ranges in the
Southern Cone of South America. Given this huge expansive range, many species occupy different habitats such as grasslands, rainforests, temperate forests, and
deserts and xeric shrublands.
Those that breed in the northern parts of North America, such as the
white-throated sparrow and
Lincoln's sparrow, migrate further southward into the continent during the winter, while others like the
dark-eyed junco have been able to adapt to staying all year-round in some areas of North America. Most North American passerellid species usually migrate short distances. Some of the Southern Cone species move northward during autumn.
In the breeding season, sparrows of different species form small-to-medium flocks, as they do when foraging in the non-breeding season.
Gallery
Notes
References
External links
American Sparrow videos, photos and soundson the Internet Bird Collection
{{DEFAULTSORT:sparrow, American
American sparrow
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American sparrow
Songbirds
Bird common names
Bird families
Passeroidea
American sparrow