My favorite bird from the trip to Yates Mill Park & Mid Pines Rd yesterday wasn’t a brightly plumaged warbler, rather it was this sweet Grasshopper Sparrow with a colorful personality!

I was thrilled to see this sweet little guy puffing out his feathers and singing his heart out on a fence post. He’d hop around and crouch low every so often then stand up straight to belt out his buzzycall of “tic tic tic pzzzzzzzzz”.
No doubt, he was doing his level best to attract a lady lol!

Grasshopper Sparrows prefer dry, open grassy habitats to hunt for a meal. As you may have guessed, their favorite food are indeed grasshoppers but they’ll eat any insect that they can catch as well as seeds.
These round sparrows aren’t the strongest flyers (something I noticed on this windy day as this bird struggled to fly at a distance greater than a few feet) so usually they tend to hunt for a meal on the ground. This makes them kinda tough to find (especially in favorite habitat of tall, thick grass) so the best way to locate one is to listen for their call.
I actually got pretty lucky here to catch a photo of one up on a fence post out in the open!

Though they do spend the wintertime in North Carolina, Grasshopper Sparrows are found in greater numbers during the spring and summer. Look for them in thick grassy fields, under power lines and recently clear cut areas through mid October here in the Tarheel state.

Photos by @sally_siko of @birdwatching_nc on the full frame beast of an SLR, the mighty @canonusa
#5Ds