Recognition: A big, clumsy, brown bird. Towhees are in essence long-tailed, oversized sparrows, a little smaller than jays, but chunkier in proportions and with perpetually crouched legs that keep them low to the ground, where they spend most of their time. No other common local bird is so uniformly brown, with the only interruption in their drab and earthy apparel coming in the form of a rusty red patch underneath their tail.
Where and When: The brown-bird lives in a wide range of Bay Area habitats, perhaps most notably in yards and gardens. Most human households have an associated resident pair who stay put all year round. They also live in other tan and dusty places that match their tan and dusty appearance: dirt roads, rocky places, chaparral, the edges of meadows and woodlands that turn dry and coppered with the end of spring. They like to have some cover to nest or dive into when alarmed, but not too much (they avoid both uninterrupted, treeless grasslands and dense, continuous conifer forests).
Voice: Brown-birds have a familiar contact call, a simple, metallic chip! note that they emit at regular intervals to stay in touch with their year-round partner. This chip! is quite loud and piercing as such things go; some have uncharitably compared it to the low-battery warning of a smoke detector. Their spring song consists of a series of similar chip notes, thrown together in a cascade that rapidly accelerates and then promptly dies out, like a bouncing ball. Tsick…. tsick… tsick tsick tsick tsick tsick.
The brown-bird, formally known as the California towhee, is the most mundane of our backyard residents. Almost every suburban home has its associated resident pair, as does every dusty roadside or urban park. They are not flashy, exciting, obviously beautiful, graceful, or melodious. This makes them an ideal starting point if you are just beginning your exploration of backyard birds, one that won’t dazzle and distract you with bright colors and a dulcet voice, as if that was what constituted the worth of a creature.
I can’t do better to open this discussion than to quote William Leon Dawson, everyone’s favorite 20s ornithologist. In his masterpiece, The Birds of California, he gave the definitive account of this bird and the virtue of plainness:
Familiar objects, whatever their worth, come to be dear to us through association. There is, honestly, no particular reason why we should be fond of this prosy creature, save that he is always around. In appearance, the bird is a bit awkward, slovenly, and uncouth; or at least, we are obliged to see him oftenest in every-day duds, and he seems to have no company manners. And for color – never was a more hopeless drab. But surely the bird must have some redeeming qualities. He sings, perhaps? Not at all; his efforts at song are a farce, a standing joke – though he is himself entirely devoid of humor. He is, to be sure, a gleaner of crumbs and odds and ends, but so are the ants; and the bird’s presence in a garden is far from being an unmixed blessing. Really, there is no reason why one should espouse the cause of this local ash-man. Yet I suppose there are few Californians who would willingly spare the homely, matter-of-fact presence of this bird under foot. Brown towhees are just birds – the same way most of us are just folks.
I’ll be delving deep, deep into the prosiness, awkwardness, and slovenliness. But first, let’s sort out these names: California towhee, brown towhee, brown-bird – which one is it?
The Importance of Names
The most straightforward of this bird’s traditional names is the simple and appropriate brown-bird. I like to explore traditional names, founded on practical functionality rather than modern taxonomy. What happened when the brown-bird ran into the complicating grinder of science? First, it was recognized that it was a towhee – related to an eastern bird with a distinctive vocalization that sounded like that unusual word, but which this particular species does not make – rendering it the brown towhee. We do have a second towhee here, the spotted towhee: the two species represent the two main towhee lineages of America, one plain and brown and the other more dashing in blacks, whites, and rusty reds, while both still conforming to what is essentially a large-bodied and long-tailed branch of the sparrow family.
It was then decided that the brown towhee was in fact two separate birds, our California towhee being separable from the canyon towhee of the southwestern states (as well as from a third relative, the Abert’s towhee). Given that we only have one brown towhee here, and that he doesn’t even say “towhee,” I’m open to reversing this progression of personally superfluous science and returning to fundamentals for daily use: brown-bird is the simplest possible title, and one to which no bird has a better claim. If you wish to say brown towhee, however, I admit that choice to be entirely defensible on the dual grounds that, first, it does make sense to recognize its kinship with the spotted towhee and, second, that “towhee” is a fun word to say.
But for daily use, the traditional brown-bird is a perfectly adequate appellation. Such a name is familiar and unostentatious, as the bird is, and utterly unreliant on that personally invisible fact that some evolutionarily linked bird in New Jersey has a call that sounds like “towhee.” In fact, there are even simpler and less assuming names in the folk annals: backyard bird and drab have also served to identify this paragon of domestic plainness. I tend to fall back on brown-bird though, which gives us a unique identifying characteristic (its brownness is more distinctive than its backyardness), is less negatively judgmental or antiquated than drab, and conforms with one of my simple guidelines for evaluating kind and humane word choice, namely What would Joanna Newsom say?
Last week, our picture window
Produced a half word,
Heavy and hollow,
Hit by a brown bird.
…
Then in my hot hand,
she slumped her sick weight
We tramped through the poison oak,
heartbroke and inchoate.
– “Only Skin” (the brown bird strikes the window at around 9:50 in this long song)
So that’s one line of personally relevant naming: I heartily endorse “brown-bird” in preference to the modern technicality of “California towhee.”
But I must confess to an even more idiosyncratic approach when it comes to this bird, long known scientifically as Pipilo crissalis (the brown towhees have since been split into the new genus Melozone). As you will observe, I enjoy reading ornithologists from the 20s or so. When these gentlemen wish to be conversational, they will sometimes refer to birds by their genus name in a tone of familiarity (“Pipilo worked himself into greater and greater frenzy” and so on). Now, given that the origin of Pipilo is a Latin verb for chirping which I imagine is ultimately onomatopoeic in origin (pip!), and that our towhee is indeed a superlative performer of pips!, and that I adore Dickens, the obvious convivial name for this bird is Pip.
My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Phlip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.
– Great Expectations
“Pip” is about all the towhee tongue can make of anything, so presumably this is what they would call themselves too (ask a brown-bird his name – Pip! is the answer you will get, if any). These birds come in pairs, as a rule, and so the natural name for Pip’s mate is clearly Biddy, his childhood friend and confidante with whom he would have settled down if he hadn’t felt a burning shame at being coarse and common. (Oh Pip, if only you hadn’t gone to Miss Havisham’s and met Estella on that fateful day!) Fortunately, towhees have no such shame. They are entirely immune to the temptations of snobbery. I therefore admit that while I am not in the habit of personally naming most of the individual birds around my yard, I have taken up sporadically referring to this faithful and homey pair as Pip and Biddy.
Even by my standards, this may seem like an overlong discussion of names before coming to the bird itself. But what I want to draw your attention to here as a general matter is the importance of choosing an appropriate name in establishing a friendly and familiar relationship with a bird. You don’t necessarily need a lot of factual information to choose a name suitable for this purpose, but even a brief consideration of what is immediately obvious – that this individual is a plain and common homebody remarkable mainly for his frequent enunciation of the syllable pip! – will probably lead you to settle on a name that is more personally meaningful and memorable than if you merely accede to whatever the books tell you, California Towhee or Melozone crissalis.
If you want to know the official name so that you can converse with birders or look up information in a book, go ahead and learn that as well. But if you are just now making my personal acquaintance, I would be happy to start off our relationship on the simple grounds of friendship, without formality or genealogical pedigree: call me Jack. And so I encourage you to take this modest first step away from boring, stuffy objectivity: when next this bird passes by your window, remark the passing brown-bird, kindly greet your backyard drab, or inquire of Pip how Biddy is doing on this fine clear morning.
The Deep Dive into Prosiness
Now that I’ve made my opening case for reconsidering your default naming strategy, relying more on first-hand experience rather than dry science, it is time to consider the kinds of first-hand experience that might influence such a naming process. (I speak of this rather formally as a “process,” but really the art of naming and nicknaming is an exercise in constant and utterly informal flux. Try a few names out and see what feels right; change back and forth as the urge strikes you.) I’ve clearly implied a certain set of traits to this bird that you may not yet be cognizant of: plainness, ubiquity, even a sort of dullness, and all in a way that adds up paradoxically to a singularly endearing character. Let’s look back at that Dawson passage again:
Familiar objects, whatever their worth, come to be dear to us through association. There is, honestly, no particular reason why we should be fond of this prosy creature, save that he is always around. In appearance, the bird is a bit awkward, slovenly, and uncouth… for color – never was a more hopeless drab…. He sings, perhaps? Not at all; his efforts at song are a farce, a standing joke… Yet I suppose there are few Californians who would willingly spare the homely, matter-of-fact presence of this bird under foot. Brown towhees are just birds – the same way most of us are just folks.
This really is an effective summary of the towhee essence, and I can hardly do better than to unpack it a little. What are the adjectives that come to Dawson’s mind? “Familiar,” “prosy,” “awkward,” “slovenly,” “uncouth,” “drab,” “homely,” “matter-of-fact.” What are the traits and behaviors that garner these labels? Being “always around,” visual plainness, and farcical efforts at song. Let me take all three of those in succession.
Always around – the domestic bird
As mentioned above, towhees are essentially large sparrows. “Sparrows” are a particular family of birds, but the word has come to stand for common, plain, brown birds that hop about on the ground, pecking at seeds and crumbs and so on. Here, our most familiar sparrows are the white-crowned and golden-crowned sparrows, which become abundant yard birds during the winter months before heading back north for the nesting season. But those birds have crowns – they are not nearly as dull as towhees. They sing – quite melodiously. And they travel – the golden-crowns all the way up to Alaska and the Yukon. When it comes to domestic plainess and earthboundedness, brown towhees are clearly the main sparrows in our lives.
And when I say domestic, I mean domestic. These birds have a higher degree of interaction with our actual domiciles, our houses, than any other birds. One of their trademark activities is to hop inside through open doorways (and then sometimes become rather confused as to how to get out). They are also famous for their habit of attacking their reflection in windows in spring. Now, they aren’t the only birds that do this – many birds become territorial during the nesting season and most don’t really understand the concept of reflections. It might not be a singular lack of intelligence that inclines the towhee more strongly to this behavior, but rather his habit of hopping up to sliding glass doors and window sills at a slow pace, from which proximate position he gets a clear view of the suspected invader.
Towhees are always around: they intrude themselves upon our attention. In a world where the standard relationship between most birds and most people is one of avoidance reciprocated by obliviousness, the towhee’s mere readiness to establish contact gives it an undeniable head start in climbing the ladder of our affections. If you only have five birds in your daily life, the brown-bird will probably rank in your top five favorite birds, because he is always there, right outside your door.
(If you see any bird doing that window tapping, know that he is not trying to get your attention or cutely trying to come inside. He – it is usually the male – is engaged in a highly stressful combat with an implacable foe. The kind thing to do would be to find a way to cover up the reflective surface temporarily: a few sheets of paper secured along the bottom edge of the window in question may be enough to break the stalemate. Otherwise they can beat their beaks bloody over weeks of unwinnable battle.)
Never was a more hopeless drab
Another part of that propensity towards territorial conflict stems from the highly territorial and highly pair-bonded lifestyle of the brown-bird. Some birds have rather weak and temporary pair bonds: most finches, for instance, spend most of the year in flocks, only pairing up in spring and often still nesting or feeding in close proximity to others of their species. They will attempt to guard their nest and female, but rarely extend this aggression much further in geographical space. What you will notice with finches, however, is their extensive routine of yearly courtship: bright colors, complex and pretty songs. When you’re dealing with temporary bonds, with females who you need to impress in the moment, that’s the working strategy.
Nothing could be more suggestive of homely joys than the sight of a wedded pair taking “the kids” out for an airing of a Sunday afternoon.
– More Dawson on brown-birds
When you are a towhee, however, you don’t really go in for fine colors. You don’t need to, because you don’t need to impress a new lady towhee each spring. Instead, they establish a lifelong pairing, a tendency which often appeals to us humans as seeming both more familiar and more respectable in some way: it isn’t too inaccurate to refer to a pair of towhees as “wedded,” as Dawson does above.
While not a universal rule, there is a recurrent pattern where these two things go together, plainness and long-term bonds. Ravens are like this. Titmice are like this (while their more social cousins the chickadees have more patterns and colors, which are thought to function as social “badges” of health and fitness, unnecessary in a society of two). And maybe that’s part of why humans aren’t bright red or blue.
In fact, humans generally respond to animals with permanent pair bonds positively, with our instinctive reaction seeming to be to find this relatable or admirable or romantic in some way. In one of my favorite Vonnegut novels, Mother Night, the hero describes how he and his wife formed a Nation of Two, independent from the outside world and needing no further human intercourse. Towhees and titmice and so on exceed us in realizing this vision: they actually do maintain a Nation of Two, from which they actively eject interlopers (including window-reflected phantasms, to the best of their ability).
The other major evolutionary force that determines color is obviously camouflage value relative to a preferred habitat. Brown-birds like it brown: dust, dirt, and droughty summers are their element. Within it, they are singularly well-colored and therefore comfortable feeding out in the open, hopping about in our open and unforested yards. They are so familiar to us in part because they are so open and unfurtive in their daily lives – they seem to actively prefer not having an overhanging plant canopy, in direct contrast to their skulky cousins the spotted towhees.
Drab, yes, but drab because they are experts at settling down and don’t need superficial finery. Drab, yes, because it allows a practical openness, rather than a need for countervailing secrecy. When the opposite to plainness, therefore, is transience of emotions, ephemeral peacockery, and an irritatingly timid tendency to avoid our human company, it becomes more clear why we fall more easily into intimacy with brown towhees than with the skittish and elusive beauties of the bird world.
His efforts at song are a standing joke
Once you become familiar with the brown-bird’s standard contact call, it becomes a ubiquitous part of daily life. Many birds have similar simple chip notes, which they use to stay in touch with each other as they forage. If they don’t hear a response, they might start chipping with a little more anxious frequency until they hear a reassuring reply. An interruption of the steady spaced chips by an explosion of fast-paced alarm notes would signify a threat or predator. The towhee’s contact chips are louder and more piercingly metallic than the average, they are more present and proximate to our homes and ears than the average bird, and their year-round pair bonds ensure a steady year-round cadence of two birds feeding together.
If you want to get started learning the calls of birds around your home, particularly outside of spring’s overwhelming torrent of birdsong, recognizing this stay-in-touch call would be a very good place to start:
Their spring song has a fairly direct relationship to these call notes: once you recognize the calls, the song is pretty easy. Let me yield the floor to Dawson one final time:
The presence and movements of the Brown Towhee are published from time to time by a metallic chip, which is quite the most familiar of vocal sounds. This chip is the ordinary keep-in-touch note, and it must also do duty for warning, for challenge, for exhortation, and other purposes which, in a sphere of action somewhat removed, necessitates the use of 450,000 vocabulary entries. Saddest of all, this overworked note must do duty for song. For this purpose it is furbished up a bit, brightened, intensified, and aspirated, till it sounds like a sibilant squeak. The singers mounts a bush or tree-top, or the comb of a roof, and with uttermost ardor delivers himself of such sentiments as these, tsick tsick tsick tsick tsick. Listen! O ye Muses, and pause, Satyrs, in your mad gambols. Orpheus will smite the lyre again: Tsick tsick tsick tsick tsick.
To us, this song seems very plain and ineloquent. Presumably, of course, its effect on females is similar to that of the more musical or elaborate songs of goldfinches, house wrens, and hermit thrushes: it still serves to demonstrate the bird’s health and fitness. To some degree, any song will do this, as it involves putting forth effort, taking time, and making oneself obvious to predators regardless of its musical content. But, to us, yes, a song of
tsick tsick tsick tsick tsick
can seem rather tame. We might be inclined to think that if such a song can serve as a clinching piece of courtship, then it must be a case similar to that when Pip, desponding at his inadequacy in the eyes of the elegant Estella, asked in confidence of the plain local girl:
“I should have been good enough for you; shouldn’t I, Biddy?”
Biddy sighed as she looked at the ships sailing on, and returned for answer, “Yes, I am not over-particular.” It scarcely sounded flattering, but I knew she meant well.
In one sense, this is clearly erroneous anthropomorphism: the song presumably sounds perfectly adequate to towhee ears. No particular lack of particularness in Mrs. Towhee is required. But there is a broad strain of truth worth remembering in this fanciful parallel. A brown-bird does not desire to sing more euphoniously, like the mistaken Pip who wants to be a gentleman. That is a lesson that the towhees have uniformly mastered. And so when we regard the vast auditory panorama of the world of birdsong and encounter a simple, rather limp-sounding song such as this, we should remember – should we ever be tempted to label it “coarse and common,” as Pip found himself labelled – the sequel in Biddy’s wise counsel:
“It was neither a very true nor a very polite thing to say.”
Now, I’m not requiring you to take every whimsical idea that pops up on this blog as philosophical gospel; I don’t demand that you throw out the normal bird names you find in the field guide and start naming all of your backyard birds after Dickens characters. But adopting politeness as a guiding principle for our conduct towards other animals might not be a bad idea; the unique thing about politeness is that it is based more on your own personal standards of decency rather than the exact station of the person to whom you are speaking. You don’t have to settle an irresolvable debate on the exact rights or sentience of towhees to amend your own behavior towards them to a state of dignity and respect.
Will you seek afar off?
“Brown towhees are just birds – the same way most of us are just folks.” There is nothing ignoble in that, nothing coarse and common. In practice, the facts of their “always being around,” of their drab plumage, and of their inexpressiveness in call and song seem if anything to elevate them in the common human view. The notable thing in Dawson’s description is the immediate paradox: there is “no reason” to espouse their cause, and yet there are few who would willingly do without them. Anyone who knows these birds already does not need my thousands of words to convince them of this: I’m merely uncovering and making plain this easily overlooked but actually quite obvious phenomenon: that our actual affections do not rely on commonly cited reasons for birding excitement like rarity, brightness of color, or beauty of song. What they actually rely on is familiarity.
Brown-birds are supremely familiar: they surround our homes, blend in comfortably with our gardens, and carry on their daily conversations outside our windows. Rare birds of brilliant red or yellow are not more or less worthy of our attention, but they are almost always harder to approach. Physical distance and timidity are the obvious obstacles to intimate acquaintance with birds: rarity and brilliance exacerbate these difficulties. If you wish to overcome those first-encountered barriers and know birds better, what you want are the opposite qualities: regular proximity and the self-possession of one who feels himself at home.
Will you seek afar off? You surely come back at last,
In things best known to you finding the best, or as good as the best,
In folks nearest to you finding the sweetest, strongest, lovingest,
Happiness, knowledge, not in another place but this place, not for another hour but this hour.
– Whitman, “A Song for Occupations”
The brown-bird is the bird nearest to you; the brown-bird is as good as the best.
Header photo: a suitably brown towhee portrait by Allan Hack.
Great job Jack of waxing poetic about our familiar friends, the Towee, as we refer to them.
Thanks Vicki!
I enjoyed this article…we’ve enjoyed our backyard couple. I call them my “fat-fats” since they are a bit rotund. Mine like chopped up peanuts and will hop to our slider and “pip” at us until we open up and toss out some peanuts for them. I thought they were trying to get our attention by “knocking” but realized after reading this he was protecting his territory! Will tape up some paper to deter him now that I know! Thank you for the great read and can’t wait to read more!
Jack–It is always with great expectations that I open your posts. And you never disappoint. This edition especially lovely! In my short career as a bird “looker”–I cannot claim the status of “watcher”–I have always loved the brown birds. So too the “lesser” goldfinch. I blame this quirk on my fervent childhood loyalty to the Brooklyn Dodgers, who had a certain “lesser” reputation–(which you are surely too young to recollect). Thank you again for such an entertaining and thoughtful meditation on the brown birds in all their aka manifestations.
I hope that someday you will collect and publish your writings!
Stephanie Prescott
Thank you Stephanie – compliments with integrated Dickens titles are my favorite kind of praise! Funny that you should mention lesser goldfinches – I took some issue with that name too and launched the campaign for calling them “greenbacks” (as in “green-backed goldfinch”) over in my Backyard Birds article. I’m glad to know there’s a market for my (not imminently) forthcoming book “Jack Fixes All the Bird Names.”
Very interesting. We have a pair that lands in our hands for nuts, seeds, and raisins. We are impressed they remembered to trust us last summer to now. They see our cars park in evening and are immediately there, on the hood, roof, tailgate, mirror, fountain, dog water bowl, or whatever, chirping for a treat. Last night one of them did not care for my offering and scolded me before biting my finger. They are cute for sure.
I am so thrilled to have found your writing, Jack! I have loved my backyard Pip and Biddy, but finding this trove of treasures opens a new world. Thank you!
Jack,
I am sending this comment in 2020 after I found your blog. I am writing to my senior community on the site of Luther Burbank’s farm in northern California, where the morning “pips” of towhees are coming back after dying down for a long time here. They have long been my wake up call at dawn and I feel blessed to hear them in force again. Everything I learned here was a delight.
Michele
Love this. I just set up a bird ID app…my brown bird friends are Townees. They are friendly…not afraid of me…don’t fly off when I come outside & if I leave the door open they come inside. A bit alarming cause I don’t want them to get hurt indoors. They easily find their way out. They do seem to know know me & my dogs.