This central spot completes a triangle with the dark blotches on each side of the throat. Note the heavy breast streaks which converge into a large central spot. Instead, I had a look at my sparrow photographs over the last few years and decided to put together this guide to their identification.Įasily the most commonly seen and heard of the sparrows. I hope they would spend a little time researching about their topics before posting or publishing anything in their papers.With snowfall predicted all of today, I didn’t want to risk getting moisture into my camera during a walk. This mistake is a big disappointed for me as I was expecting to hear or read only truthful information from our leading newspapers.
Eventhough the caption never said anything about this bird being our former national bird the term “maya” is enough for the readers to consider it is the former national bird. The caption as what I had read, roughly states that the bird in the picture, the Eurasian Tree Sparrow in English, is locally called maya. Not even its relative.Īt that time, after our conversation, I thought that maybe it was just a misidentification of my girlfriendwife, but in the early week of February 2007 she informed me that one of the Philippine leading newspaper, the Philippine Star, Januissue, in the article intitled “Ohh Baby, Baby It’s A Wild Bird” by Ann Corvera, posted a picture of what seem to be a city bird in our topic, like the one in the first image.
I am pretty sure that the bird in the first picture is not a maya. Rice fields are the favorite place of maya, in sharp contrast with the birds in the city sidewalks, buildings, parks and plazas and others. They are mostly the reason why the rice fields contains a long colorful ribbon called banderitas, like the one we see in streets during fiesta, designed to sway even in a little breeze, and a human-sized scarecrow made of straws. Those references coincided very well with the habitat of maya that I have known, the flock of birds I have always seen crowding in the rice fields, often feasting on our precious rice and then quickly fly if someone comes near. What I had learned from my parents, grandparents and the old people in our place is that our former national bird is look like the image in the left. I have known maya long before I saw this kind of bird and had read some school books with a description of its habitat when I was a child. The real maya has a black head and somewhat dark red in its body. I was surprised! I admit that the brown bird (in the image above) is as small as maya but it is nowhere the same in appearance. When I asked my girlfriend (now my wife) about the name of these birds in their dialect (My mother tongue is Cebuano from Mindanao while my wife is Hiligaynon from Capiz) she readily answered that the bird’s name is maya. Personally though, I do think it was a wrong name, it is not even in our local dialect. In our place when I was a child, we call it citybirds or lovebirds, because it is very common in the city and we often seen it flying in pairs or in groups. A friend of mine from negros call this bird guryon. I came to realize this widespread mistake when I happen to wonder about the name of the particular brown bird so abundant in every Philippine urban areas. The misidentification of these birds is partly due to the false information by the media that largely funneled to these people where it has a strong presence. Most of these people reside in the city, the place where only a handful of these fine birds would venture. Even to the people whom I considered as very educated. I never thought that a bird like maya, with its previous high status as our national bird, would be wrongly identified by many people.
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