In 1760 the English naturalist George Edwards included an illustration and a description of the white-throated sparrow in the second volume of his Gleanings of Natural History.

Edwards based his hand-coloured etching on a "neat drawing in colours" supplied by the American naturalist William Bartram from Philadelphia in Pennsylvania.

[2] When the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin revised and expanded Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae in 1789 he included the white-throated sparrow.

Both variations feature dark eyes, a white throat, yellow lores and gray bill.

[9][10] The aggression is linked to an increased rate of estrogen receptor alpha expression in white-striped birds.

They nest either on the ground under shrubs or low in trees in deciduous or mixed forest areas and lay three to five brown-marked blue or green-white eggs.

Tan males invest in parental care and guard their mates from others searching for extra pair copulations (EPCs).

White males invest in securing additional mates and EPCs through song advertisement and intruding into neighboring territory.

Mating with the opposite morphs and using alternative reproductive strategies helps maintain competitive equilibrium.

[12] This behaviour has been described genetically to follow from the chromosomal inversion of a supergene which acts as an extra pair of sex-determining genes, resulting in four phenotypes that reproduce in a disassortative mating pattern.

[17] Despite a high level of conspecific rivalry within white-throated sparrows, this species is often dominated by other seed-eating winter residents, even those that are no larger than itself like the song sparrow, and thus may endure high levels of predation while foraging since restricted to sub-optimal sites at times by competition.

[18] Not to mention numerous mammalian carnivores, at least ten avian predators often hunt them and they are among the most regular prey species for some smaller raptors, i.e. the sharp-shinned hawk and eastern screech-owl.

[19][20] These birds forage on the ground under or near thickets or in low vegetation by kicking backward with both feet simultaneously.

In a 2019 study based on monitoring efforts dating from 1978–2016, white-throated sparrows were found to be one of the most susceptible birds to building collisions, even being referred to as "super colliders".