I approached slowly. They were active in a cluster of bushes, some scratching the ground, others moving from branch to branch. All were brown, some with smudges of grey; one, with a black dot prominently displayed on his chest, the escutcheon of his species – was a Lark Sparrow. I approached quietly, but not quietly enough: they flew away. Not far. To the next huddle of shrubs, the nearest cover and another feeding station. Even experts say, ‘Oh, sparrows!’ without distinguishing one species from another, except a few – the Lark Sparrow and the Chipping Sparrow with a chestnut crown and black and white eye stripes, for example.

In James Lipton’s amusing lexicon of compound nouns, An Exaltation of Larks – a covey of partridges, a paddling of ducks, a murder of crows – we are given a ‘host of sparrows’. It is an old usage but a misnomer; sparrows never form a host, arrayed for military service, as angels do. When the nestlings have flown, adults come together with other adults, of the same and different species, forming feeding flocks that harvest an autumn bounty of seeds. Perhaps this harmony depends on the plenty of the harvest. The Vesper Sparrow might not join the Clay-colored Sparrow scratching for seeds in a drought year; but, so far, I have never seen an autumn without large mixed flocks of sparrows. As to the richness of the sparrow fauna in El Charco, it is enough to keep birdwatchers busy: 10 species have been seen, 28% of the total number of species nesting in North America.

If we divide sparrows into those that are difficult to identify, and those that are less difficult, in the first group I would place Black-chinned, Brewer’s, Clay-colored and Lincoln’s sparrows. Chipping, Lark, Rufous-crowned (black whisker), Savannah and Vesper (white outer tail seen in flight) sparrows are less difficult.

Have I left anyone out? The most common sparrow in San Miguel de Allende, as in every urban center on the continent, is the House Sparrow, also called the English Sparrow; it came to Brooklyn from England in 1850. More handsome than many sparrows, it won favor at first, but lost its high rating when it spread rapidly across the continent and fed boldly beneath outdoor dining tables before guests had finished their lunch, and pinched the nesting boxes of more desirable song birds. The House Sparrow diet progressed with the times, from oats fallen from the feed bucket of a dray horse to popcorn everywhere.

House Sparrow apart, the sparrow diet has a general uniformity: mostly seeds, from grasses and forbs (non-grass broad-leaved herbaceous plants), in autumn and winter. Since the diet of the majority of the human race is seeds too – barley, corn, rice, wheat – we share so much of our diet with sparrows. El Charco has a bounty of grasses, a landscape now protected from grazing animals; at last count there were 46 species of grass. What we do not share with sparrows is their diet in the breeding and offspring-raising season, when the need for protein-rich foods is greatest: insects of many kinds, grasshoppers, for example, beetles, flies and other invertebrates, spiders, for example. Sparrows provide their young with a diet almost entirely composed of protein-rich insects. When the nestlings have grown, and fend for themselves, parents resume their gregarious life-style, and enjoy an autumn and winter diet of seeds again.

Adapted from Wild & Wonderful: Nature Up Close in the Botanical Garden, El Charco del Ingenio, San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato.