I was an intoxicated Nightingale amongst the owls.

December 9, 2009 I stopped at the Gaviota rest stop near Santa Barbara California. It was raining lightly. I saw a bunch of White-crowned and Golden-crowned Sparrows and a few Song Sparrows. I saw a weird sparrow I thought was a Golden-crowned Sparrow x Dark-eyed Junco hybrid. Sibley, D., 1994, A guide to finding and identifying bird hybrids, Birding 26, pp. 162–177. This article supposedly reports a Junco x Golden-crowned Sparrow hybrid pairing. Ernst Mayr and Lester L. Short, Species Taxa of North American Birds: A Contribution to Comparative Systematics. This publication also is supposed to list this hybrid combination. (from Handbook of avian hybrids of the world; by Eugene McCarthey)

I think the dark on the bird’s breast was from the rain. The bird had yellow legs and a yellow-greenish bill, wrong for both species.

Here are pictures of White-crowned Sparrow x Slate colored Junco hybrids.

http://02b93fb.netsolhost.com/blog/?p=2022#comments .

http://birdfellow.com/journal/2009/09/06/probable_dark_eyed_junco_x_white_throated_sparrow_hybrids .

I think mine is an Oregon Junco x Golden-crowned Sparrow.

Pictures:

http://picasaweb.google.com/lawofficeofmarkbrown/WeirdSparrow#5440638422780814338 .

http://picasaweb.google.com/lawofficeofmarkbrown/WeirdSparrow#5440640092910016290 .

.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Mark (Nightingale) Brown