Below the thickets of chokecherries and nannyberry in my yard, Spotted Towhees. Pipilo maculatus, the spotted chirper or the Mottled Scratcher, is a common backyard sparrow of Colorado’s Front Range. Families of them live in the tangles at the edges of my and my neighbors’ yards. There, they forage for seeds and insects. There, they nest and raise their young.
To watch them a bit closer, I placed one of my field cameras on the same ground the towhees scratch for birdseed. Here’s one of them, a male, doing his towhee thing.
And here’s an apparent pair of them — first the grayer-headed female, then the male — doing their thing.
The Rustle of a Towhee
There is so much to adore in this behavior. But one of the things I most like in the sound — the repetitive rustle of the leaves that form the soft ground of a towhee’s thicket.
Like Thoreau, I have taken this sound for the activity of a larger animal. Here he is in his journals, describing the Eastern Towhee (the “ground-robin” here).
Many a time I have expected to find a woodchuck, or rabbit, or a gray squirrel, when it was the ground-robin rustling the leaves.
Sunday, May 12, 1850
In a lovely essay on Spotted Towhees, Jack Gedney calls the sound of a Spotted Towhee the “Big Rustle,” giving name to the distinctive sound of this bird.
“An irregular linear course…”
The Spotted Towhee’s effort is worth so many words. Here is the Birds of the World account: “Ground-feeding bird that traverses foraging beat: an irregular linear course… .”
And here is a haiku, which the birds offered to me.
sunless thicket
a towhee's groove
through the unpassable
Credits
Header Photo by Lance Reis on Unsplash
All other photos and videos by Jared Del Rosso
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