Female house sparrow?  Nope.  When you see her in real life, this bird is way too large to be a house sparrow.  This is a golden-crowned sparrow (Zonotrichia atricapilla) photographed in November in California.

Golden-crowned sparrows breed from Alaska to British Columbia and spend the winter west of the Cascades and Sierra Nevadas from southern British Columbia to Baja, Mexico.  At the Snow Goose Festival my location finally matched their range.

Sometimes golden-crowned sparrows hang out with their close relatives, white-crowned sparrows (Zonotrichia leucophrys) shown below.  I used to think white-crowned sparrows were large but golden-crowned are larger.

Their golden crowns can be subtle at this time of year but the color intensifies as the breeding season approaches.  In spring the male’s head has a bright yellow patch surrounded by black as shown in the Crossley ID Guide below.

I saw these birds for the first time at Bidwell Park in Chico, California (“Life Birds”).  Even the boring ones were wearing faint golden crowns.

(golden-crowned photos from Wikimedia Commons; click on the images to see the originals. White-crowned sparrow by Chuck Tague)