Sparrow III
Nikkor 200-500 VR/TC 14 III @680mm, f8, ISO 110, Nikon Z 6
Crop (slightly more than APS-H), NR (8:00 morning); the male is also keen to feed the fledging young.
Sparrows chirping is still common in calmer parts of Greater London with lots of gardens, and it seems livelier this year. A recent study of molecular sequences of over a thousand genera of songbirds put the age of the sparrow genus at about 14 MY old. The previously photographed whitethroat’s genus is older, about 18 MY old. That means that a roughly the same looking warbler remembers our common ancestor with gibbons.
The early, evolutionarily simpler songbirds (passerines) woke up to a changed world in the aftermath of the K/T asteroid event
(about 66 038 000 years ago). The established order of niches was turned on its head and the conflux of consequent changes accelerated the evolution of basal lineages of the archaic songbirds. They adopted nesting in open nests soon after the event while their toes went from two at the front/two at the back to three forward/one backward to improve the grip on the branch (some 65 MY ago). Today the sparrow possesses a sophisticated foot with tendons autolocking mechanism that gives them a pretty easy, energy-efficient way of perching.
South East
