But do not despair. The Brewer's Sparrow is a vocal show-off, the unmatched master of trills. The clicking quality of these sounds seems to fit the heat waves rising from the sagebrush at midday, but it is usually "Short Songs" that you hear then. The pinnacle of this bird's virtuosity, the "Long Song", is more likely to be heard at dawn and dusk.

Why? As in many other species (best-studied in warblers), the male Brewer's Sparrow sings one way when paired and another way when looking for a mate. According to Brett Walker of the University of Montana, both paired and unpaired males sing long songs in the dawn chorus and in territorial interactions. They use a variety of song types, constructed by stringing together different trill-types from a large repertoire. Paired males sing little after dawn, but unpaired males keep after it all day, intermittently. These unpaired males typically use only a single type of short song. If paired males do sing after dawn, they are more likely to use long song, except when they are trying to attract a second mate. If they do this they use short song, out of earshot of their primary mate's territory. This latter behavior certainly suggests that short song is more important for attracting females. The role of song in attracting EPCs in Brewer's Sparrow is not known.

What this boils down to is that you can get a pretty accurate impression of the number of males present by listening to the dawn chorus, but after that you will be hearing mostly "losers." These are birds that have lost their mates and those that have never attracted one. On the other hand, the occasional short-singer may be a would-be bigamist.

I've recorded Brewer's Sparrows off and on for the past 25 years, but I have few recordings of the long song. Even though it makes a lasting impression, it's difficult to record, because the wind is often blowing in the treeless shrub-steppe where these birds nest. In fact, that wind is the reason for this over-long succession of trills. Birds that live in open, and therefore windy, habitat tend to trill a lot, because repetition is a good way to get a message across when chunks of it are likely to be lost in transmission.

If a breeze blows up while you are listening to a Brewer's Sparrow, you will notice that it can blow away parts of the song. A trill is actually a series of identical clicks. If you hear the beginning and end of the trill, can make out the acoustic quality of some of the clicks, and hear enough to estimate the repetition rate of the clicks, you don't need to hear all of them. Your brain can fill in the blanks caused by the wind. Perhaps for this reason, click trains are very common sounds in the animal world. Usually it is very simple features of these trains that communicate the information, things such as duration, amplitude, and rate.

One way of telegraphing the beginning and end of a specific trill is to switch to a very different trill-type. Brewer's Sparrows seem to do this (see sound 12 below). The repetition rates and the apparent pitches of adjacent trill types seem to differ more than they would if the trills were ordered randomly. This is quite evident in Short Song, which usually is a fast trill followed by a slow trill, the whole lasting less than 3 seconds. Long song can last 18-20 seconds, and may have half a dozen or more different trills, with some types repeated later in the song. The extreme redundancy of these songs suggests that they are either very important, or very likely to be degraded by noise, or both.

Below, I present Short Songs (Sounds 1-11) first so you can see the fine structure of the trills. Long Songs (Sounds 12-13) use the same trills, just more of them and more types. Sound 14 is a string of call notes repeated at regular intervals.

The Brewer's Sparrow is a bird of Big Sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata and other shrubs that dominate the arid shrub-steppe of the Great Basin. It is currently on a number of watch lists, because shrub-steppe is dwindling before the march of economic development. See Greater Sage-Grouse for more information on this situation. A population currently recognized as a subspecies of the Brewer's Sparrow, Spizella breweri taverni, the "Timberline Sparrow," breeds disjunctly in northwestern Canada and adjacent Alaska in stunted conifers at treeline. Some authorities consider it a separate species, and others believe that it occurs in our region (but see BOGR). Any Brewer's Sparrow found at timberline should be recorded if it sings, as the songs of the shrub-steppe and timberline forms are said to be different.