Spotted Towhee

Banding Eastern Towhees here is so common it gets slightly boring after a while. Might not top the Catbird numbers during migration but there are days we don't bother taking a picture of Towhees for the banding website.

Still, Towhees were on my target list for the Northwest because they have a different version. The Spotted Towhee. Looks a lot like an Eastern Towhee...but with spots. We humans are so inventive, eh?

I actually found the first Spotted Towhee on the first morning of the trip but since it was at dawn there was almost no light to shot in. Most other finds were in and out of bushes so quickly that there was no time.

Then, on our way back down the trails at Nisqually, my wife found a bird that appeared along the river's edge. She stopped to get a shot and I proceeded to do the same. Our best view of the trip of the Towhee.



Very pretty bird. One other difference from the western birds and our eastern species is that ours usually have more orange of 'straw' colored eyes. I have seen only one red eyed Eastern Towhee out at Wekiva during banding.

You can compare the Spotted Towhee to the Eastern Towhee by visiting the Towhee page of my photo web site.