Date: 4/18/26 8:24 pm From: Roniq Bartanen via Tweeters <tweeters...> Subject: Re: [Tweeters] Beware the Chipping Sparrow
Hi Roniq Bartanen here, I lead a monthly bird outing at Green Lake as a longtime volunteer for Birds Connect Seattle and have for many years!
Yesterday our group of 20 bird enthusiasts saw 4 different Chipping Sparrows, visually without sound help from Merlin. All were seen in different parts of the park. Two of them were together on the ground out in the open, one gathering nesting material a short distance from the other.
Two others were singing and seen out in the open at eye level in two separate parts of the park, far away from the others.
I've seen Chipping Sparrows at Green Lake every year since 2020, in the months of May, June, July and August. I've also seen them in the NE Seattle (Ravenna) Neighborhood numerous times, once collecting nesting material near Picardo pea patch and flying in to a residential yard in June 2022.
In 2024 and 2025 I had numerous sightings of them at parks/nature areas such as Union Bay Natural Area, Ravenna Park, Marymoor Park, Maple Leaf Reservoir Park and my own small condo garden in Maple Leaf in May 2025. All were seen, as I don't have the Merlin app on my phone.
July 2024, I had long lovely looks at a juvenile Chipping Sparrow at Juanita Bay foraging on the ground.
Needless to say, I feel like sightings of this Sparrow in Western Washington, have been increasing. Wonder if anyone else feels the same?
All this data I've shared is from my own eBird and sightings, not sound I.D.
I'm interested if anyone is doing a study on Chipping Sparrow range in WA? In my opinion due to my history of sightings, I feel it's becoming less rare to see them in western WA, and I couldn't be more delighted 🙂.
For occasional content celebrating the culture and joy of mindful, urban and accessible birding as well as info on upcoming bird outings visit https://shebirds.com/contact.
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From: Tweeters <tweeters-bounces...> on behalf of Chuq Von Rospach via Tweeters <tweeters...>
Sent: Saturday, April 18, 2026 7:04 PM
To: Dennis Paulson <dennispaulson...>
Cc: TWEETERS tweeters <tweeters...>; Carol Riddell <cariddellwa...>
Subject: Re: [Tweeters] Beware the Chipping Sparrow
On Apr 18, 2026 at 18:09:33, Dennis Paulson via Tweeters <tweeters...><mailto:<tweeters...>> wrote:
I’ll add to what Carol said. I have been seeing this rash of Chipping Sparrow reports by sound, and indeed it seems that Merlin does confuse juncos and Chipping Sparrows with some frequency. And of course this isn’t the only error that Merlin makes. I understood that the main reason for developing Merlin was so that people could learn bird sounds more readily, but it seems that it is used primarily for adding to eBird lists.
It seems appropriate that any time Merlin reports an unexpected bird, if at all possible that bird should be confirmed with your own eyes or your own knowledge of bird vocalizations.
I recently ran into this — I started getting repeated hits for a Chipping Sparrow near where the Port Gamble Harris’ Sparrow is hanging out. I ended up not logging it into eBird but adding it to the comments after 20 minutes of trying to get eyes on it. (Hint: that location is full of crowned sparrows and juncos, too).
My general take on Merlin these days after too many hours of diving into it’s reliability and consistency (for reasons that don’t matter here) is that if eBird notes the bird as orange dot or red dot, Merlin is not “good enough” to warrant logging it. Note that Merlin also uses red and orange dots and they do NOT always line up with eBird: I trust eBird here when they differ.
Something I wish Merlin would do is available with the Haiku bird ID system (which I have experimented with and recommend with limitations, but which, being an unattended device, should not be used to add eBird data) — Haiku includes a confidence level (high/medium/low) on its IDs. If Merllin did this, it and eBird could work together to set a policy to accept high confidence IDs but not lower confidence ones — and actually publicize the policy in the apps.
This is a solvable problem if eBird and Merlin choose to.
Haiku, FWIW, uses BIRDnet as its data source, as do some of the other similar systems like Birdweather.
Chuq
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Chuq Von Rospach (http://www.chuq.me)
Silverdale, Washington
Birder, Nature and Wildlife Photographer
