Towhee came calling

We had another new species at the feeders here at the Aerie this morning. A handsome devil called the Eastern Towhee (also called the Rufous-sided Towhee and sometimes called the Red-eyed Towhee) was seen scratching at the seeds beneath the feeder. This is a robin sized bird with a black head, back and tail. It sports a rust colored patch along each side under the wing and has a white breast and pair of white feathers on the tail margins. All the colors are sharp and crisp so he looks like the bird is wearing a formal tux—with tails—and a rust colored vest over his white shirt.

This is one bird whose song is easily recognized for it repeats over and over, “Drink your teeeeeaaa. Drink your teeeeeaaa.”

But the name…aaahh THAT can get confusing.

All About Birds from Cornell, lists both the Eastern Towhee and the Spotted Towhee as separate species. However, they also note that the two hybridize where their ranges overlap. They also mention that the Spotted hybridizes with another towhee down in Mexico called the Collared Towhee. And, to add to the confusion, there are a number of subspecies of the Spotted Towhee that are recognized along the Pacific coast.

• The Spotted Towhee hybridizes with the Eastern Towhee where their ranges meet in the Great Plains. It also hybridizes with the Collared Towhee where their ranges meet in Mexico.
• Twenty-one different subspecies of Spotted Towhee are recognized, three on islands off the Pacific Coast.

eNature states that the Spotted and Rufous-sided Towhee are the same species but there is an Eastern Towhee (and Red-eyed Towhee) , too. (See all the Towhees here.)

I have, and use, three bird guides. The oldest isBirds of North America by Chandler S. Robbins, Bertel Braun and Herbert S. Zim. It is copyrighted 1966 and is the field guide I picked up when I was a senior at Rutgers back in 1970-‘71. It lumps the Spotted and the Rufous-sided Towhee together as a single species, Pipilo erythrophthalmus, calling them western and eastern races.

Back in the early 1990s I picked up a copy of the second edition of National Geographic’s Field Guide to the Birds of North America (copyrighted in 1987). Like Robbins, Braun and Zim, the staff that put this guide together lump both the Spotted and Rufous-sided Towhee into one species and divides them as races.

A few weeks ago I went and splurged on a new field guide, Sibley Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern North America by David Allen Sibley and copyrighted 2003. Sibley makes no mention of the name “Rufous-sided Towhee” at all but instead lists the Eastern Towhee (Pipilo erythrophthalmus) and the Spotted Towhee (Pipilo maculatus) as separate species. Sibley still mentions that they hybridize where their ranges overlap.

This is a case of reclassification and re-reclassification . All of which can get quite confusing and is the reason new field guides are printed every few years.

As we enter the month of May, I expect more and more species to arrive on their migration northward.