This highly variable, but distinctive species breeds along the California coast and also in the Great Basin but skips over most of interior California except during the winter and migration. Savannah Sparrow is the only member of the genus Passerculus. Precise subspecific identification is speculative outside the breeding season because of the high degree of individual variation within subspecies. Birds breeding here have been assigned to P. s. alaudinus, sometimes called Bryants Savannah Sparrow, a California endemic and species of special concern. It has suffered recent population declines and range contraction. It is a fairly heavily pigmented race in the sandwichensis group.
HBW merges most of the subspecies, recognizing only two, but splitting three southwestern races into separate species. Under this scheme, our bird would be nominate P. s. sandwichensis. The name sandwichensis refers to Unalaska I. and Sandwich Sound, Alaska, not to Hawaii.
