Listening is the best way to find birds. If you only look with your eyes, you will miss a lot. For species that are shy and secretive, listening is often far more effective than looking for detecting their presence. One bird like this is the spotted towhee.
Looking at a picture, or when seeing them well, you might not think that spotted towhees are easy to overlook. They are striking birds of vividly contrasting black, white and rusty red. The “spotted” of their name refers to the paint-splatter white across their wings, and they were once known as the “red-eyed towhee” in acknowledgment of their demonically glowing red eyes. When you see them well, they seize your attention.
But often you won’t. Spotted towhees are birds of crowded understories and their preferred foraging habitat is characterized by lots of low cover in which they can hide as they scratch vigorously in the leaf litter. This can be found in a variety of local habitats, from ferny forest floors to scrub communities along the coast to inland chapparal to yards with plentiful low bushes in which to hide. This penchant for densely covered understories explains why their most useful identifying feature is neither the spots nor the red eyes, but the other part of their name — the “towhee,” the distinctive squealing, mewing call that gives them their name.
“Tow-wwhheeee” or “jo-ree,” this rising, irritated sounding call, is more clearly two-syllabled in the eastern towhee that first earned the name, but our local rendition is still recognizable as belonging to the same name. Look up this sound on Cornell’s All About Birds website or in their free Merlin Bird ID app and listen for its distinctive quality: nasal, drawn-out and whining.
What does this call mean? It can express various degrees of alarm, but is used more frequently than many birds’ officially recognized “alarm calls,” seemingly prompted by the slightest unease or disturbance. Sometimes it seems to be an attention-getting call used between paired birds. Ornithologist Joan Roberts concluded that it expressed a “general dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs.”
The grumpily squealing towhee call is not their only vocalization. At this time of year, spotted towhees are also prolific singers, as males issue the loud, springtime announcements of their territories. The classic spotted towhee song is simple: one explosive trill, an abruptly ringing and rapidly repeated note sometimes likened to the twanging of a rubber band. That’s the right kind of buzzy, unmusical tone, but the towhee song is harsher, higher pitched and louder. Overall, it’s much more forceful and propulsive than the gentler, drier trill of juncos, while typically being faster than the ending trill of Bewick’s wrens (their songs also have a short or long introductory passage).
Spotted towhees have one last memorable sound. It’s not a song and not even a call. Technically, ornithologists might call it a “non-vocal sonation.” But it is highly distinctive, and probably the non-vocal bird sound I hear most often (the wing whistle of the mourning dove is good, too).
What sound is this? It’s their scratching, a diagnostically vigorous two-footed kick that aggressively throws the leaf litter out of their way as they search for seeds or arthropods buried in the detritus.
Naturalist Henry David Thoreau once wrote about this sound in his journal: “Many a time I have expected to find a woodchuck, or rabbit, or gray squirrel, when it was the ground-robin rustling the leaves.” ( Add ground-robin to your list of towhee monikers.)
Edward Howe Forbush similarly described how the towhee “rustles the dry leaves like some animal 20 times his size.” In winter, fox sparrows might perhaps be confused with spotted towhees in the loudness of their kicking, but from May until September, you can be quite confident that the loud, repeated rustling issuing from the unseen depths of a coffeeberry is none other than the spotted towhee.
Do you want to see spotted towhees, the red-eyed wonders of black and white and rusty flanks? Before you raise your binoculars, you have to know where to point them. And the way you detect the towhee’s presence is by listening for their irritated groans, the harsh twanging of their spring elastic, and their powerful and untamed rustling among the fallen leaves.
Jack Gedney’s On the Wing runs every other Monday. He is a co-owner of Wild Birds Unlimited in Novato and author of the forthcoming book, “The Private Lives of Public Birds.” You can reach him at jack@natureinnovato.com.
