Saltmarsh Sparrow — Wings of NH

What you notice first

A small, sharp-tailed sparrow that flushes low, flies twenty feet just over the grass tops, and drops back in — with a bright orange-buff triangle around a grey cheek.

Voice

Almost no song to speak of — a soft, wheezy, gasping hiss, easy to miss under wind and surf. Call is a light "tik."

Where & when

The high salt marsh behind Hampton and Seabrook and around Great Bay, where the cordgrass gives way to salt-meadow hay. June and July, on a rising tide that pushes the birds up out of the grass.

Why it's hard

Habitat specialist with almost nowhere to go. It nests only in a narrow band of high salt marsh on the Atlantic coast, New Hampshire holds a thin northern edge of that, and sea-level rise is now flooding nests faster than the birds can adapt — one of the steepest declines of any bird in the region.

The whole life history is a bet against the tide. Saltmarsh Sparrows build their nests low in the high marsh and time nesting to the roughly 26 days between the monthly spring tides that flood everything. A nest started at the wrong point in that cycle drowns. In a marsh that’s getting wetter, the wrong point is more and more of the cycle.

There is no pair bond — males don’t defend territory and mate with as many females as they can; females do everything else, alone. Where the range meets the Nelson’s Sparrow’s a little further north, the two hybridise.

New Hampshire’s marshes are a small but real piece of the global population. If you want to see one, go with someone who knows the specific marsh, on a high tide, and be quick — a flushed bird is back in the grass in seconds.