White-crowned Sparrow

While I was taking pictures of the Dark-eyed Juncos, I waited a bit hoping some White-crowned Sparrows would show up.  Like the Juncos, they are ground-feeding sparrows, so they usually come around after the other more common House Sparrows and House Finches have knocked a bunch of seeds out of the feeder. I've been trying (not very often, truth be told) to photograph them for about a year, but they always seem to show up when the light is poor, or when I'm in a rush to get somewhere - like off to work. They're also a little more skittish than some of the other feeder birds, so when I have gotten my camera out and set up, they see me and split.

I've seen them around pretty frequently lately, and my patience this time was soon rewarded.

 This is a juvenile. His crown isn't quite white, and he's got brownish stripes instead of full black.

 This is a mature bird with the distinctive black and white stripes on his head.

There are several sub-species of White-crowned Sparrows. These are of the subspecies nuttalli, which are the coastal variety.  I've also learned from the illustrations in my National Geographic Field Guide that those stripes on its head have names. The field guide had an illustration showing the difference between different subspecies of these sparrows, and showed that the little white stripe above the eye goes all the way to the beak on some varieties (like the nuttalli), but ends just above the eye in some other varieties. Anyway, the illustration said something like, "the white supercilium is pinched off by the black suprloral stripe."   So I looked it up, and a "supercilium" is a stripe over the eye (it's Latin for "over the eyelash"), and a supraloral stripe is one that extends over the lores. I looked up "lores" and that is the little area on a bird's face between the beak and eye where it often will have no feathers. A stripe extending directly through its eye is called, perhaps not surprisingly, an eyestripe.

All these words just to describe the features on a tiny sparrow. Does the area on a human face between the eyes and the nose have a name? If it does, I don't know it. But because birders are such a detail-obsessive bunch (they have to be to be able to distinguish similar birds), I now know what that area is called on a bird.

White-crowned Sparrows, January 6, 2013. Nikon D5000 and Sigma 500mm lens. Identified in National Geographic Field Guide.