A Bright March Towhee

Walking by the garden recently, my attention was grabbed by a noisy rustling in the dull, dead leaves. A bird flew up, a flash of red caught my eye. In a moment I realized it was a towhee—a friend I hadn’t seen for a couple of decades. Where had this beautiful bird been all this time? The population of songbirds has been precipitously falling in recent years, due to human activities. Was this the reason why I hadn’t seen a towhee for so long? Are they getting rare and this sighting might be my last?

The Eastern towhee is described in one of my bird books as a “large New World sparrow.” Like some other cousins in the sparrow family, towhees forage on the ground. They use a “double-scratch” method of kicking both feet back simultaneously to expose bugs. Quite unlike the single-leg, more dignified and regally-paced scratch of a chicken, a towhee really gets into its dance—which is why it noisily caught my attention.

Back in the 80s, when I last spotted this bird, it was known as a rufous-sided towhee. The taxonomy of songbirds has been shifting in recent years, as DNA analysis and more acute observations have become available. It’s tough to follow a little songbird around the woods and note its habits. A recent breakthrough in this area has placed miniature transmitters on these birds, so they can now be tracked.

The towhee’s back and head are black; it’s belly is white. Sandwiched between these stark penguin colors are bright rufous sides. I think rufous is a bit of a tame word. I would be inclined to call it “screaming burnt orange,” especially when spotted in dull March, when the bird creates a racket among dead brown leaves on a still morning.

As another tidbit of a towhee taxonomy shift, New England towhees are red eyed while those south of Georgia have pale yellow eyes. (I didn’t get close enough to this guy to note the color—or whites—of his eyes.) These were once thought to be separate species but now they interbreed in the Carolinas. (Resulting in orange eyes, maybe to match their sides?) During the Pleistocene period Florida was an island and some towhees apparently became isolated there and their eye color morphed to yellow. Now they are mixing again. Darwin would love it.

I hope that my sighting of the towhee means that it’s making a comeback—at least a come back to our woods. It’s scary to think of where this human-caused collapse of songbird populations might be going. We need our feathered friends—both for the useful niche they occupy in the environment (read: bug eating) and for those flashes of beauty that cause our souls to soar.