Welcome to Marin’s autumn singers — the golden-crowned and white-crowned sparrow

Have you been hearing new birds? Spring and summer are the main seasons for singing birds, but the relative quiet of autumn can make certain sounds stand out as new migrants arrive.

In the neighborhood, there are two birds in particular that strike people’s ears, raising eyebrows and sending the bird attentive searching through the bushes to find the authors of those sounds. The two autumn singers are the golden-crowned and white-crowned sparrow.

The golden-crowned sparrow has the most memorable of all bird songs, with an easily distinguished melody that makes it the bird vocalization I am asked to identify more often than any other. In its most classic local form, it is composed of three clear notes in a plaintive descending pattern: “I’m soooo tired.” Any three-word phrase with a melancholy tone can serve as a memory device; “oh dear me” is another popular rendering, while despondent Yukon gold miners heard the bird sing “no gold here.” It’s not uncommon to hear birds sing just the first two notes (“I’m soooo …”), or occasionally a variation on the pattern in which the three-note sequence goes first down and then back up in pitch. All of these are the song of the golden-crowned sparrow.

The song of the white-crowned sparrow is heard perhaps even more often in Marin, and features a family resemblance that makes it easy to connect to its author once you’ve learned the related golden-crown. It begins with a similar clear whistled note — but only one — before resolving in a variable jumble of notes. This makes recognition of both of these songs easy at this time of year.

If you hear two or three clear whistled notes, you’re probably hearing a golden-crowned sparrow, while if you hear just one of those clear notes, you’re probably listening to a white-crowned sparrow.

Nor does visual identification generally pose any great difficulties. As close relatives, the two species share some features: both are relatively large sparrows with mixed browns on their backs and unstreaked bellies.

White-crowned sparrows have prominent white bands alternating with black on their heads, while golden-crowned sparrows have, unsurprisingly, yellow patches on their head. This namesake feature of the golden-crowns can appear rather underwhelming for the bulk of their sojourn with us, but before they head back north in spring, you can see them molting into their breeding plumage, turning their crowns into a brilliant sunflower yellow above thick, black eyebrow stripes.

The one case that frequently causes some confusion are the juvenile white-crowned sparrows. These first-winter birds have stripes of alternating dark brown and lighter tan on their heads. Note that the pattern is the same, though the colors are different, as well as their orange to yellow bills, which stand out at any age from the dull, grayish beaks of golden-crowns.

Part of the appeal of these birds is their sudden ubiquity. After months without them, their renewed presence in our yards and neighborhoods has a combined freshness and familiarity, like the new season of an eagerly awaited TV show, or the latest volume of a favorite novel series. Both white-crowns and golden-crowns are widespread and abundant, common in both backyards and natural scrubby habitats with dense bushes to hide in. You can see them scratching on a trailside for fallen seeds or climbing to a feeding station for sunflower, millet or suet. They are old familiar friends whom we haven’t seen since May.

Part of their appeal is as the most prominent and unmissable examples of the great phenomenon of bird migration. The Bay Area’s white-crowned sparrows come mostly from the northwest states and British Columbia. Our golden-crowns come from far northern Canada and Alaska. Now they’re in our yards!

While many of our familiar backyard birds such as jays, towhees and titmice stay put all year round, they suddenly are joined by exotic neighbors, great travelers from distant lands, small but mighty fliers that flew through the night for weeks, until they saw the old familiar place they remembered from the year before — your house.

And part of their appeal is to simply hear once more that wild tundra music, those sweet-sad whistled notes that pierce through the season’s silence to tell us of the north.

Jack Gedney’s On the Wing runs every other Monday. He is a co-owner of Wild Birds Unlimited in Novato and author of “The Private Lives of Public Birds.” You can reach him at jack@natureinnovato.com.