This article was republished here with permission from Great Lakes Echo.
By Clara Lincolnhol, Great Lakes Echo
A very round white throated sparrow is the heavyweight champion of the 2025 Wisconsin Fat Bird Week contest.
The bird, coined the “spherical white-throated sparrow,” won by a landslide, receiving 72% of the vote in the final round against its nearest competitor, a “rotund ruby-throated hummingbird.”
The winner made it through eight rounds in the single-elimination, March Madness-style bracket competition against seven other birds.
The Fat Bird Week Contest celebrates Wisconsin’s native bird species and also aims to educate the public on ways to help them, said Emma Schatz, the digital communications coordinator at the Natural Resources Foundation of Wisconsin.
“We thought Fat Bird Week could be a fun way to engage the community in a light-hearted thing, but then also incorporate that educational piece of learning the different ways to help protect Wisconsin’s birds,” Schatz said.
In 2024 the foundation partnered with SOS Save Our Songbirds, a conservation organization that aims to protect birds, and started Fat Bird Week. The contest is held during the spring migration and 2025 is its second year.
The founders derived inspiration from Fat Bear Week, another bracket-style competition, she said.
Eligible candidates for the competition must be native to Wisconsin. Pictures are chosen from a bird photo contest the Natural Resources Foundation hosts and from photographers who have given permission for their pictures to be used, Schatz said.
“Then it’s looking through them and deciding which are the most round or fluffiest birds, just looking at the angles,” she said. “If it’s a good, well-framed photo of a round bird, then it’s likely going to be a contender.”
The other six chubby contestants in this year’s competition were a yellow rumped warbler, pine warbler, yellow warbler, eastern bluebird, dark eyed junco and northern cardinal.
Schatz said the contest has reached beyond Wisconsin. She’s seen people in other Great Lakes and Midwest states get excited about the contest and share results online, which she says is exciting.
“We saw so much support on social media,” she said. “It’s a really cool experience seeing how much of a community has come from it.”
Voting started on May 2 and continued until May 9. Each day was a new round where voters picked the bird that looked fattest.
Catch more news at Great Lakes Now:
Everything you need to know about the Biggest Week in American Birding
Spring bird migration in the Great Lakes
Featured image: This ‘spherical white-throated sparrow’ was crowned winner of the 2025 Wisconsin Fat Bird Week contest. Credit: Natural Resources Foundation of Wisconsin[php function=”remove_swift_shortcodes”]