What’s that thing you spotted at the treeline?  Is spotted towhee, comrade.

Some articles out there will copy-paste the idea that spotted towhees are timid and hide from people, but I don’t think it’s actually true.  One time my husband nearly stepped on a spotted towhee while we were walking to the bus stop.  We had an amazing view of it.  Black hood and back, rusty blood red eyeball and flank, pale grey belly.  Larger than chickadees, more the typical size range of emberizid sparrows.  And of course, they have a lil’ spatter of pretty white spots.

They might just seem easy to miss because they favor thick, short trees – especially evergreen pines.  However, even in those trees, they aren’t too hard to spot, because they like to perch near the top.  One time I went to the beach at Dash Point and a towhee begged for food from us.  On another PNW beach, out on one the islands, I came across a bunch of short pines with a bunch of towhees in them – more than I’d ever seen before.

Spotted towhees are perching birds, which are united in having a very long backward-facing toe called the hallux.  They use this to grip tree branches.  Small passerines like this sometimes feed on the ground by poking through leaf litter, making little backward hops.  The hallux pushes the leaves apart, and they grab any grubs they see after the sweeping move.  My husband pointed one out to me that was doing this.  Since then I’ve also seen another species do it – I think dark-eyed juncos?

It makes me think of James Brown.  Jump back, wanna kiss myself.  Ungh!

But yes.  Spotted towhees.  Cute.  Common.  They screech like a little pterodactyl.  Sometimes they make a “cellphone” call similar to a dark-eyed junco.  Keep an ear out and you’re more likely to see them.  And enjoy.

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EDIT:  Forgot to mention, dark-eyed juncos have varied color over their range, but in the PNW, their colors are oddly similar to a spotted towhee.  They both have a cellphone call, and it makes me wonder, are our local juncos impersonating towhees?  This would be similar to how downy woodpeckers look like hairy woodpeckers, which has been postulated to help them benefit from the reputation of or avoid aggression from the larger birds.  Juncos being smaller than towhees, and locally more similar to them than elsewhere, the samey call…

If I had time to science it, I would attempt to observe if juncos make the cellphone call while doing anything else junco-ish, or while acting territorial.  Also whether juncos in other regions without the “oregon” markings make that call.  Or whether they look similar to other birds in their respective areas.  That kind of shit.

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