Golden-crowned Sparrow

About the Golden-crowned Sparrow

The golden-crowned sparrow (Zonotrichia atricapilla) is a large New World sparrow found in the western part of North America. The golden-crowned sparrow is one of five species in the genus Zonotrichia, a group of large American sparrows. It has no subspecies. It is a sister species with, and very closely related to, the white-crowned sparrow; studies of mitochondrial DNA show the two evolved into separate species very recently in geologic time. The white-throated sparrow is a slightly more distant relative. Hybridization with both white-crowned and white-throated sparrows has been reported.

Ornithologist John Latham first described the species in his book General Synopsis of Birds in 1781, but he thought it was a variety of what he called the "black-crowned bunting" and neglected to give it a scientific name. That lapse was corrected in 1789, when Johann Friedrich Gmelin assigned it the name Emberiza atricapilla in the 13th edition of Systema naturae. Various authorities in the 1800s (including John James Audubon) placed it in the genus Fringilla, but many assigned it to its current genus, Zonotrichia, once William Swainson had established that genus. Peter Simon Pallas... Wikipedia →