Dan's Feathursday Feature: Sedge Wren

I’m a big fan of the little Sedge Wren not just because it’s a tiny, secretive bird with a huge voice, but because it has traversed a biological and taxonomic minefield and come out the other side unscathed, untethered, and unhumbled.

It just keeps on being itself while all the smart folks watching it try to sort out where it “belongs.”

Start with its name. Because it looks very much like its close relative, the Marsh Wren, it used to be called the Short-billed Marsh Wren. It’s true; one thing that sets the Sedge Wren apart from the Marsh Wren is that it does have a slightly smaller bill. It’s a characteristic that is easily noted in the field if you are lucky enough to have one perch on your finger so you can measure its bill with that micrometer in your back pocket….

An easier way to tell the Sedge Wren from the Marsh Wren is by where you find them. The Marsh Wren prefers the area of a marsh where there is a foot or more of standing water, with plenty of cattails and other rushes. The Sedge Wren, instead, likes slightly higher, drier fringes of the marsh—often where there is no standing water at all. So it’s easy to see why ornithologists and taxonomists long considered the Sedge Wren of North America to be a regional variation of the Grass Wren of Central and South American grasslands. You can go ahead and call it a Sedge Wren, they said, but biologically speaking it’s a Grass Wren with slightly different clothing.

In 2014, some scientists figured out they had been wrong and recognized the Sedge Wren as a species of its own. They gave it back the Latin name Cistothorus stellaris, which it had when it was called the Short-billed Marsh Wren. But other scientists did not agree, and they still consider the Sedge Wren as a regional variation of the Grass Wren. These scientists insist on calling it Cistothorus platensis.

You say platensis, I say stellaris. To all these taxonomic meanderings the Sedge Wren says: “Ya, whatever.”

If it had been up to me, based on what little I know of the Sedge Wren, I think I would have given it the name peregrinus, which means wanderer or pilgrim. It has this annoying habit of not following rules about where you can expect to find it. Oh sure, it will always nest in a certain type of habitat—wet grassland areas—but year by year you can never be sure which grassland it will grace with its presence. Like nomads who follow their own internal compass and chronometer, Sedge Wrens spread their tents seemingly at random. One year in your favorite grassland you may see dozens of them; then the next year, none. I can vouch for this. This summer, in the small patch of grassland that I monitor for nesting birds, I have counted eleven Sedge Wrens, staking out their territories like so many overlapping circles on a Venn diagram. In the previous two years I saw only one.

I like that about the Sedge Wren. The bird defies labels and refuses to get pegged to one locale.

Even with its song the Sedge Wren keeps us guessing. Two or three crisp chirps followed by a fast arpeggio, it sounds something like “dick, dick, cis-cis-cis-cis-cis.” That sounds a lot like the Dickcissel, you say? I prefer to say that the Dickcissel sounds like the Sedge Wren.

Whatever…. 
I’ll see you next year… maybe, says the Sedge Wren.

Dan's Feathursday Feature is a regular contribution to the COS blog featuring the thoughts, insights and pictures of Chicago birder, Dan Lory on birds of the Chicago region.