SOUTHERN SWAMP SPARROW 1475 



Egg dates. — Ontario: 28 records, May 19 to July 25; 14 records, 

 May 30 to June 9. 

 Quebec: 26 records, May 9 to June 26; 18 records, May 20 to June 2. 



MELOSPIZA GEORGIANA GEORGIANA (Latham) 



Southern Swamp Sparrow 

 Contributed by David Kenneth Wetherbee 



Habits 



Because the specimen he described came from Georgia, John Latham 

 named this species Fringilla georgiana in 1790. Known earlier by 

 William Bartram as the "reed sparrow," it was first called the swamp 

 sparrow by Alexander Wilson when he redescribed it as Fringilla 

 palustris (swampy) in 1811. Recognizing its close taxonomic rela- 

 tionship to the song and Lincoln's sparrows, Spencer Fullerton Baird 

 placed all three species in his new genus Melospiza (song finch) in 1858. 

 Because of the similarity of their juvenal plumages, Richard Graber 

 (pers. comm.) would unite Melospiza and Passerelle, as J. M. Linsdale 

 (1928) and others have recommended on morphological and behavioral 

 grounds. Graber considers georgiana, on the basis of plumage charac- 

 teristics, to be evolutionarily the "most advanced" member of the 

 combined genera. Though this group is famous for geographical 

 variation in color and size, only three subspecies of the swamp sparrow 

 are recognized by the current (1957) A.O.U. Check-List: the nominate 

 southern race, georgiana, a lighter northern race, ericrypta, and a darker 

 coastal race, nigresccns. The habits of all three are treated together 

 here. 



In comparison to its much-studied congener, the song sparrow, the 

 swamp sparrow is rather poorly known, a simple consequence of the 

 ankle- to waist-deep morass that is its usual habitat. As E. H. 

 Forbush (1929) aptly expresses it: 



The Swamp Sparrow is not a public character. He will never be popular or 

 notorious. He is too retiring to be much in the public eye, and too fond of the 

 impassable bog and morass to have much human company; and so he comes and 

 goes unheralded and to most people unknown. He is the dark little bird that 

 fusses about in the mud when spring floods have overflowed the wood roads, or 

 slips through the grasses on marsh-lined shores of slow-flowing, muddy rivers. 

 Any watery, muddy, bushy, grassy place where rank marsh grasses, sedges and 

 reeds grow — any such bog or slough where a man will need long rubber boots to 

 get about — is good enough for Swamp Sparrows. In such places they build their 

 nests. But in migration they may appear almost anywhere, though seldom 

 distinctly seen and recognized by ordinary observers, because of their retiring 

 habits. When they are looked for, they sneak about, mostly under cover, and 

 hardly show themselves sufficiently for identification, but if the observer 



