There are some birds that are so successful I have to wonder if they’re out of balance with nature.  It may be an indigenous species, but is it overpopulated because humans messed something up for them?  Causing problems for less human-adapted cousins?  Crows are known to have had a major population spike in the Pacific Northwest.  How about chickadees?  How about dark-eyed juncos?

Dark-eyed juncos are in the New World sparrows, or Passerellidae.  They could be the most populous bird in Western Washington, or a close contender to the more obvious ones.  But you might not know it.  In parking lots and urban centers, invasive starlings, house sparrows, and house finches are much more obvious.

It’s when you get into areas with a little less pavement, like the apartment complexes across the street from the grocery store, that the native mobs give them a run for their money.  As ground feeding birds, juncos are more visible than chickadees and nuthatches, and they are just everywhere.  So many of them, making a call like a wobbling wire, flashing the white feathers on the sides of their tails like flamenco dancers, as they flit from bush to beauty bark to bush.

Passerellids are LBBs (little brown birds) that can be hard to ID, but hereabouts the dominant morph of dark-eyed junco is the “Oregon,” which has a strongly black hood.  The only ground-feeding bird you might mistake them for is a spotted towhee, with black hood and reddish flanks, but they have very different habits and calls, the towhee with a dramatic blood-red eye and white spots.  Juvenile juncos make a cricket-like chirp when begging for food and attention, following around a parent.  They can distinguished because the hood is less strongly black and the flashy white tail feathers are short.

I didn’t look up anything outside of the genealogy.  I just picked all this up from observation, which was easy as hell because there are so many of them.  Still, it’s nice to see a native bird doing well, and they are very cute.  Their little white beaks have a lavender hint which is more obvious in photography than in flyby.  They do fly by, almost like barn swallows, in front of your bicycle wheels or your car grill.  Is it to show off for potential mates?  A daredevil routine?  The must do it well; I’ve never seen a dead one.

I don’t have a lot of stories about them.  The one time I saw brood parasitism in action, a junco was the victim.  I once did a series of four small mixed-media paintings, birds with roguish accoutrement and nicknames.  Gangster birdies – a house sparrow, house finch, dark-eyed junco, and white-crowned sparrow.  The only one that sold at the gallery was the house sparrow, for thirty-five 2010 dollars.  The junco lost that contest, but they still win every day.

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