![\"song](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/song-sparrow-3383b-ron-dudley.jpg\")
1\/2500, f\/6.3, ISO 640, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\nI photographed this Song Sparrow (I believe that’s the correct ID, though in this case I’m not certain) yesterday morning on Antelope Island. This sparrow and others of several species spent most of their time digging through the detritus beneath the sagebrush, rabbitbrush,\u00a0greasewood\u00a0and other plants looking for seeds. As I watched them I wondered how all these birds would ever manage to survive without the bushes, for more reasons\u00a0than one. Besides providing seeds, cover and nesting sites for these birds,\u00a0bushes like these also provide something else – access to food during winter.<\/p>\n
There’s been a thick carpet of snow on the ground in northern Utah for some time now and that snow obviously prevents songbirds from accessing many of the seeds they need to survive the\u00a0winter. But beneath each\u00a0plant is a “snow shadow”, an area\u00a0directly beneath the bush\u00a0where the snow was prevented from covering the ground by the presence of the plant itself. It’s in the snow shadow that the birds spend most of their time feeding because only there can they access the seeds that have fallen from the bushes. True, some are still up high on the\u00a0dried plants but by this late in the\u00a0year most have fallen.<\/p>\n
In this image this particular sparrow had fed right up to the edge of the snow around the bush but it went no further for the obvious reason that the top of the snow\u00a0was mostly\u00a0barren of seeds. You can see how thick the snow is and how abrupt the border is between the snow shadow and the snow itself.<\/p>\n
As I watched these birds I thought about the millions of acres in the west that have been “chained” (dragging huge chains between large tractors and other pieces of heavy equipment) in order to destroy exactly this type of sagebrush steppe\u00a0habitat and replace it with grasses and other small plants more suitable for grazing livestock. Many of those areas have now been taken over by the\u00a0dreaded and invasive cheat grass and suitable habitat for\u00a0these birds is gone. Destruction of these habitats is still\u00a0occurring (though chaining is less often used)\u00a0and I see it happening regularly – the most recent example being a large\u00a0area on the\u00a0east slope of the Stansbury Mountains here in northern Utah.<\/p>\n
Thankfully such activities won’t be occurring on Antelope Island anytime soon\u00a0because it’s a State Park. But many other areas in the\u00a0west\u00a0still seem\u00a0to be up for grabs.<\/p>\n
Ron<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s well-known that birds need appropriate habitat to survive and thrive, particularly during the breeding season. But they need it during winter too.<\/p>\n
Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":36159,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,334,8,392,523],"tags":[31,2785,80,574,996,2787,522,499,644,286,2786,290],"class_list":["post-36156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-antelope-island","category-birds","category-ecology-and-environment","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-song-sparrows","tag-antelope-island-2","tag-chaining","tag-cheat-grass","tag-greasewood","tag-habitat","tag-livestock-grazing","tag-melospiza-melodia","tag-rabbitbrush","tag-sagebrush","tag-snow","tag-snow-shadow","tag-song-sparrow"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/song-sparrow-3383b-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-9pa","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36156\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}