LeConte’s Sparrow

Saturday evening I went down to the park, on my way to my mom’s place, to see what was down there. It was getting dark enough that I was thinking that it may be a waste of time, because it was dark enough that it would have been hard for me to get a very good photo of anything, but I went any way.

I was by the visitor center and saw a pale gull sitting on the beach. I looked at it through me binoculars and saw that it was a Glaucous gull. I decided to pull my camera out and see how well it worked in the low light. It worked alright, but it was kind of slow to focus compared to when the lighting is better.  I put my camera away and continued down the trail.

I got to the battle site bench and walked out off the trail. I walked over a bit before I started down onto the beach. As I walked over the peck of the beach I saw movement down below me in some short green vegetation. Just then a kind of small light colored flew up and down the beach a short distance then ducked down into some tall beach grass. I thought it looked kind of odd, so I pished a little bit and the bird hoped out and sat on top of the grass. I got my binoculars up and looked through them. I saw that it had a orange face and chest and knew that it did not belong here, so as quickly as I could I got the plastic bag off that I had keeping my camera bag dry, and got my camera out. I looked through my camera but there was to much grass between my and the bird, so hoping that it would stay put I slowly moved down so that I could get a better angle on the bird. The bird stayed put but when I looked through my camera I could not see the bird.  I did eventually find the bird in my camera and took a few photos of it with the camera partially zoomed in so that I had a couple of photos of it in case it moved before I got the camera zoomed all of the way in. I did get a couple photos with the camera at full zoom, then the bird flew a short distance up the beach and disappeared. I then took a photo of my photo with my phone and sent it to dad.

I stayed on the beach and waited for dad to get there after he had said he was on his, so that I did not spook the bird and make it fly further away. Once he got there I stayed on the beach where I could see more of the beach and he walked along the top of the beach. As he neared where I had seen it disappear a small light colored bird jumped up and flew down the beach a bit then disappeared back into the grass. It looked like the bird I had seen before. He walked around up there a bit more but did not get it to fly again. He came down and talked with me for a bit and I showed him one of my better photo of the bird. He took a picture of it with his phone and sent it to a couple of people, then he went back up and walked back across the top of the beach to see if we could see the bird, but it did not fly. By than the lighting was pretty bad he head home and I headed to my mom’s place.

When I got there I looked in the bird book and saw that the best match was a LeConte’s sparrow. I texted dad and let him know what I though it was and he said that another person had also thought it was a LeConte’s sparrow. It sounds like this is the first record of a LeConte’s sparrow in Alaska!