Birds of Central Oklahoma

All birds Wrens

Bewick's Wren, adult
Adult Photo by Becky Matsubara from El Sobrante, California. CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Bewick's Wren

Thryomanes bewickii

Here all year.

Recorded by Mark McClelland. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, via xeno-canto, trimmed and volume evened out.

Look for

  1. Plain brown on top, and pale gray to white underneath.
  2. A bold white stripe over each eye.
  3. A long tail with white spots on the corners. It often holds the tail up or flips it around.

A little about it

Bewick's Wrens live here all year. In Oklahoma, they live in the middle and west of the state. You say the name like "Buick," the car.

It eats mostly bugs and lots of spiders. It climbs all over trees, poking into cracks in the bark, and it flips over leaves on the ground. At feeders, look for it on the suet. It eats chopped apples too.

In winter, a Bewick's Wren is usually alone, or sometimes in a pair. It gives harsh, scolding calls when something bothers it. Its loud, bubbly song can sound a bit like a Song Sparrow's.

The female lays 5 to 7 eggs, white with brown and gray blotches. They hatch in about 14 days. The young leave the nest about 2 weeks later.

Fun fact

A Bewick's Wren will nest in almost any hole. People have found its nests in mailboxes and even in tin cans.

When it's here

Taller bars mean more sightings. Most often seen in July.

Birds by season

How big

SparrowRobinCrowGoose

About 5 inches. Smaller than a sparrow, and a bit smaller than a Carolina Wren.

Where to look

Thickets, bushes, fence rows, and the edges of woods. It's fairly common in neighborhoods too, so look low, near bushes and logs.

  • Yards and parks
  • At feeders
  • In the woods

People have spotted it at Lake Thunderbird State Park.

Could it be something else?

  • Carolina Wren

    A little bigger, and warmer reddish brown, with a cinnamon orange belly. Its tail is shorter and has no white spots.

Where these facts come from