Some birds get shortchanged with the names we assign to them. The house wren and house sparrow are on top of the list. We love our houses, but we don’t want to be identified with just a house. Car ads routinely show families in their SUVs barreling across deserts, splashing through streams and ricocheting down mountain roads. That’s where we see ourselves. Hanging around the house is the ultimate in boring.

This is actually the third column on changes at Kathryn Albertson Park, but the second on expected/possible changes in bird occurrence over future decades. Last week I dealt with species where change seems reasonably predictable. We’re now getting into species where I’m going to do more fact-based reasoning and extrapolation, aka guessing. Data are from eBird, and I define winter as December, January, February. The other three seasons follow.