Eastern Towhee Breeding Season

Here's another bird that I'm seeing and hearing quite a bit of lately, presumably signaling their breeding season too: the Eastern Towhee.

The towhees are our largest sparrows, and the Eastern Towhee is also one of the most distinctively colored sparrows too, making them easier to ID than the sparrows that are a variation of the little brown bird. My field guide says that they're singing things like "jink denk te-e-e-e-e-e" and calling things like "chewink" or "zhwink", but to me I'm hearing it more like a lispy "thweet". And I've been hearing quite a bit of it over the last couple weeks.

Yesterday I talked about how the Northern Flicker used to be considered 2 different species but are now considered 1. That theme is reversed with the Eastern Towhee, which along with the similar-looking Spotted Towhee used to be considered the Rufus-sided Towhee. The Spotted Towhee is lives out west but will interbreed with the Eastern Towhee when their ranges overlap. Presumably the overlap region between the towhees is smaller than the overlap region for the flickers, or the tendency to interbreed is stronger in the flickers. The flickers and towhees remind us that the idea of a species is a human construct to help us understand the natural world, but isn't a perfect representation of how organisms breed, pollinate, or otherwise reproduce.

My picture is of a singing male. If it were a female, the black feathering would instead be brown, which would still look a little different color than the rufus coloring on the sides.

April 13, 2022 at Duke Farms
Photo 189541929, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)


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