Fire-red eyes burn in the dark.
For a long time you see nothing at all, your attention drawn only by a loud shuffling in the fallen leaves. But you peer deeper into the tangled undergrowth, until an indecipherable movement blinks, your eyes fix on the spot, and this uncompromising countenance comes suddenly into view: black pupils centered in a black face, set in globes of glaring red, smoldering in the shadows.
We call this bird the spotted towhee, in recognition of the drops of white scattered upon her back and wings. She lives here among the cover and concealment of the understory, scratching in the leaf litter for fallen seeds and small invertebrates. Like most such birds of the ground, her dominant coloration is dark: think of the earthy tones of forest wrens and thrushes, or the brown birds, quail, and sparrows of the dusty drylands. But compared to those peers of the dirt and darkness, she leaves uniform obscurity far behind, with those bright white beads the least of her divergences from plainness.
Spotted towhees wear three colors: black above, rusty red on the flanks, and white on the belly. This is not as great a departure from conservative camouflage as it might seem: seen from above it is mostly a prudent black, dappled with white like the shadowed ground sprinkled by the sun. From the sides, the rusty flanks merge with the earth. And the white belly is only likely to be seen from below, as when a male climbs to a high perch to sing, where it will be backgrounded not by the dark soil, but by the lighter sky. The white may even have another practical function, as with the white in their tail corners: to flush visually-responsive insects, who hop in sudden self-defense upon seeing that burst of light, to their doom. This is the standard explanation for white in the outer tail, a widespread trait upon which numerous birds have converged—see juncos, mockingbirds, and pipits, for example.
Less plain, though still practical: the spotted towhee may strike us as particularly handsome, an eye-catching bird when seen in a rare unobstructed view, the opulent aristocrat among the plain puritans of the understory. The ensemble of that plumage is difficult to dismiss.
But no feature of her plumage stands out like those baleful glowing eyes.
Far more than spotted, but a towhee it is
The fiery red eye of the bird, his active movements and challenging call give a suggestion of vigor and energy.
– Ralph Hoffman, Birds of the Pacific States
A quick glance might suggest possession by malevolent spirits, or at least glaring and unyielding resentment. In the fuller picture, such interpretations would clearly be psychological overstatement. But still, to call her merely a “spotted” towhee—as if that smattering of freckles was the important part, and not the jet black and smoldering, implacable red!When the ornithologists first discovered this bird, they named her more appropriately the red-eyed towhee. You can see that history in the scientific name still borne by the eastern version: Pipilo erythrophthalmus. You know opthalmus refers to eyes from “ophthalmology” but erythro is a less frequently encountered Greek red, generally reserved for medical terminology and oddities like erythromania, “a mania for the color red; or by extension, an obsession about blood.” Yes, that’s the kind of red we’re talking about here.
What has happened since is the bifurcation of old red-eyes into two species, the spotted towhee in the west and eastern towhee in the east. (In the ebb and flow of splitting and lumping, they also had a joint spell as the “rufous-sided towhee,” before adopting their present arrangement in 1995.) For everyday use, I advocate a return to the more essential feature of those shocking bloody orbs: let’s call her “red-eyes” again.
After all, this division of east and west is a relatively unclear one, rather than a sharp divide, as suggested by the historically fluid family tree. The two species interbreed in the Great Plains and many of their differentiating characteristics proceed along a spectrum, rather than existing in two simply distinct forms. We don’t have one clear and uniform “spotted towhee”—this western species alone has been split into over 20 different subspecies, generally progressing to be more similar to the eastern towhee as you move towards the Atlantic. “Spotted” and “eastern” are recent and superficial tags for the current best approximations of taxonomy, rather than an ancient division between two obvious species.
But even more important than the precise state of the science is the practical state of the individual: out of the many regional variations of red-eyed towhee across North America, you probably only live with one. In daily life, you have no need for an excessive taxonomical lexicon in order to differentiate this bird from birds we don’t have here. You only need one name, so I would choose the most appropriate from that menu graciously given to us by four centuries of laboring scholars: the red-eyed towhee.
In the description above, Hoffman appropriately put his finger on “the fiery red eye” as the species’ key feature of note. But I have no need for even his level of professional (though still eloquent) restraint. I think the dangers of overenthusiasm in this context are highly limited. So let’s take it up a few Blakean notches.
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes!
– “The Tyger”
Those unforgettable glowing eyes, against that moonless black! Our demon of the chaparral is like Blake’s Leviathan, with eyes like “two globes of crimson fire, from which the sea fled away in clouds of smoke,” or like his “mighty Devil folded in black clouds” who inscribes in corroding fires such pieces of pertinent wisdom as:
Exuberance is Beauty.
How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?
Everything that lives is holy.
– “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”
I rejoice in the red-eyed demon in this most straightforward of ways—as a stunningly red-eyed creature. And my personal rejoicing process involves the adoption of a name I can wholeheartedly embrace. Disregard the stuffy propriety of the taxonomic sticklers. Decline to split hairs. Choose the most fitting and beautiful name. What do you see when you peer into the blackberry? The red-eyed towhee, glaring in the shadows.
And what about that second word, those odd six letters? The word “towhee” refers to their most distinctive call, given frequently to express a range of meanings extending from general alertness to extreme antagonism. In the eastern form which first earned the appellation, it is more clearly two-syllabled than in our local birds, who give a very nasal rendition, slurred to the point of being only vaguely two-parted. This means you have to use your imagination a little to hear them say their name. But say “towhee” they do.
Elsewhere, I forbade you from calling the brown bird a “towhee.” (The science has since caught up with me and moved the brown birds into a separate genus, though the common name still retains that inappropriate onomatopoeia.) This bird I discourage you from calling “spotted”—why would you when you can call it the “blood-eyed demon” or at least the “red-eyed towhee”? For I will admit that here at least we have a legitimate towhee, who regularly erupts in that querulous whine.
The multifarious loquacity of the red-eyed demon
The Rufous-sided Towhee is a highly voluble species.
– Joan Betz Roberts, “Vocalizations of the Rufous-sided Towhee,” 1969
The red-eyed towhees have more sounds in their repertoire than that mewing joree. They rank firmly among the numerous birds that are more commonly heard than seen—if you know what you are listening for. And if you aspire to this devil’s acquaintance, they have three preeminent sounds with which you should be familiar.
The Querulous Squeal
The Song of Monotonous Persistence
The Big Rustle
The Squeal, the Groan, the Namesake Mewing
That first sound, introduced above in both eastern and local variants, is after all their appropriately eponymous vocalization, whether you call them towhees, jorees, chewinks, or catbirds. There is a spectrum of tonal qualities across the continent: roughly and approximately speaking, more westerly populations are more nasal and slurred, while eastern birds are more clear-toned and two-parted.
Our local birds are the most nasal and slurringest of squealers. This gives their call a far more expressive quality than those relatively clear tones of the eastern towhees. Pete Dunne calls it “a nasty, whiny, rising-and-falling, catbirdlike mew.” “Nasty” is a little rough, but the irresistible temptation to apply vibrantly biased adjectives is a testament to that sense of overflowing expressiveness.
“His face practically erupts with drama,” Mrs. Crummles declared on meeting Nicholas Nickleby’s friend Smike, in the screenwriters’ appropriate paraphrase. I could say the same thing about our local demon’s voice: from one’s first encounter it exudes an air of personality to an unparalleled degree. There is no other call in all of bird language upon which I could riff so effortlessly in an inexhaustible flow of fitting euphemisms:
The querulous squeal
The irascible groan
The possessed mewing
The grumpy wheeze
The dissatisfied whine
The moaning of the blood-eyed demon
For connoisseurs of devil groans, the classic study remains that of Joan Roberts cited above. Since connoisseurs might actually want to know what the birds are trying to say. The conclusion of the scholar? That the mewing itself exists along an intelligible spectrum of signification, from a calm attention-getter (“Hello my partner, look at me”) to an alarmed or antagonistic form (“Whaa! Trouble!” or “Do you dare to impinge upon my coffeeberry?”). The clearest sign of increased tension and alarm, as with many birds, is when the call is repeated at more frequent intervals. Roberts’ analysis also found that the more piqued of the possessed shrub cats uttered calls that were slightly longer and rose further in pitch than calm versions. If a bird sounds like this, it probably is roughly as resentful of disturbance as it sounds:
Listen close, hypothesize, and then correlate with observation: this is the way to tune your ears to the demonic frequencies and understand the hundred causes of their eternal discontent.
The Song of Monotonous Persistence
As soon as the winter rains start the first ferns from the mould, the song of the Spotted Towhee sounds with monotonous persistence from a perch in a tree or from brushy thickets.
– Hoffman, Birds of the Pacific States
Our most westerly position on the mewing spectrum resulted in a variant of that call that was highly nasal and nearly one-parted compared to the two distinct and relatively clear-toned notes of the eastern version. The red-eyed devil’s song has a parallel longitudinal evolution. In the east, its classic form is a three-parted drink your TEA!
But out here in the land of our most tortured moaners, the song also has been squeezed, compressed, and shorn of excess musicality, reduced in general to the concluding trill alone.
It is a very simple song, the notes of the trill scrunched and compacted into a fine buzz or rattle. Look at the sonogram: you can see the same note repeated in a very rapid series, to the point of not being easily distinguished by our ears, unlike the concluding trill of a Bewick’s wren song (usually countable) or a junco song (almost but not quite countable). This tends to transform its impression upon us from the musical towards the insectoid, from the separate notes that an instrumentalist might intentionally perform to the mere twanging of a taut elastic.
Monotonous it can be. Simple it undoubtedly is. But this song embodies the quality that underlies all birdsong, expresses the central drive that is sometimes obscured by surface euphony. Here the urge is hairy and unrefined, not neatly transmuted into delicate warbles and fine fluting. They need to do this: an unmated male might sing for 70%, 80%, 90% of his time. Scientists observed a towhee for eight hours; in that time he blasted out 3,390 songs. 3,390 songs! What strenuous physical labor could you be motivated to do for eight hours at a stretch?
Birdsong in its essence is propulsiveness and explosivity, contained force desperate to escape. On an old locomotive, the building steam awaits the engineer’s tug on the release valve. The heat rises, the pressure builds, the atoms collide in every direction.
And so the red-eyed demon climbs from the coyote brush, heedless of danger. He mounts the oak to its highest point. He tilts back his head, opens wide his beak, and obeys that deep compulsion: to burst, buzz, and rattle to the furthest limits of his strength.
The Big Rustle
The third essential sound with which all acolytes of the dark lord of the brambles should be familiar is neither a song nor a call. Technically, it’s not a “vocalization” at all. But it is highly audible and surprisingly distinctive: their outrageously obvious kicking in the leaf litter.
Many a time I have expected to find a woodchuck, or rabbit, or gray squirrel, when it was the ground-robin rustling the leaves.
– Thoreau, The Journal, 1850 (you can add “ground-robin” to your list of aliases)
A few local birds can be distinguished by non-vocalized sounds. The wing whistle of the mourning dove. Perhaps some mighty destructive hammering of a pileated woodpecker. But this is the most frequently encountered and useful of such sounds: you really can identify this seemingly anonymous scuffling behind the hazel with a high degree of accuracy. Only the winter fox sparrow kicks in the woods with an approaching forcefulness, so from May until September, I think I have yet to be mistaken when naming the red-eyed devil as the author of that disturbance in the duff.
Birds have their various specialized adaptations to most effectively exploit their given niche. Flickers have those extravagant tongues. Chickadees are acrobats. The blue squawker has an extraordinary memory. And towhees have the hind toe hypertrophy of professional kickers after years of training and the shortened femur-to-tarsus ratio of born kickers after millennia of natural selection. The long arc of evolution has brought this being to this point: the Greatest Bilateral Scratcher in the World!
And we clever humans are the rare species that has developed an extensive academic apparatus specially adapted to increase our ability to appreciate every such wonderful freak of nature.
Dependence of Spotted Towhee on foraging by vigorous scratching correlated with relatively large development or hypertrophy of a flexor muscle of hind toe (musculus flexor hallucis longus), and on locomotion by hopping and catching body at end of bilateral scratch with relatively short femur and long tarsus, and strong development of hop recovery muscles (e.g., musculus femoritibialis externus et medius).
– Cornell’s Birds of the World account, summarizing the extensive 1957 study of John Davis, “Comparative foraging behavior of the Spotted and Brown towhees”
Ah, the wonders of science, that enable me thus to wander through the woods, hear an innocuous rustling, note the quick forward hop immediately succeeded by the reverse power scratch, and remark to myself with heartfelt admiration, “Good God, what a musculus flexor hallucis longus that bird must have!”
Here among the fallen leaves
Red-eyed towhees have few rivals in rustling through that stratum of decaying leaves, grasses, and assorted vegetative remains. The “litter” we call this layer—the discards, the leftovers, the trash. Really, the towhees’ domain is a fountain of life, decomposing plant matter passing through the underappreciated world of the detritivores to be turned into the rich humus that feeds the tallest trees. Red-eyes sort through it all, kick aside the leaves, overturn the stones, and extract a rich and varied diet, eating more seeds than anything else, but also including substantial amounts of fruits (for which they’ll also hop, climb, and flutter) and invertebrates. They were made to feed here.
They were also made to nest here. And this is something I haven’t talked about enough: the varied and wonderful world of nests. After flight, it’s perhaps the most immediately fascinating thing about birds—that endless gallery of instinctive, artful, and supremely functional feats of architecture.
… those beautiful & admirably adapted fabrics which have astonished philosophers of all ages, & compelled even the most infidel of them to exclaim—Here, as in every part of his bountiful Creation has God made himself manifest.
– John Kirk Townsend, Description of the Birds of the Columbia River Region, 1836
It’s true, I am a fairly infidel philosopher and nests do astonish me. In broad outline, there are just a few main types:
- Cavity Nests: Holes in trees, naturally-formed or actively excavated. Used by a significant subset of woodland birds including woodpeckers, titmice, chickadees, nuthatches, bluebirds, and certain swallows.
- Cup Nests: Usually built in trees, sometimes on other structures, from a variety of plant materials. The most popular songbird choice, since cavity supply is finite.
- Ground Nests: In the big picture, this category is dominated by birds in treeless settings—think rocky islands and tundra, seabirds and shorebirds and gulls and so on.
There are comparatively few birds in our part of the world (the terrestrial habitats of coastal California) that nest on the ground: why choose such a vulnerable setting instead of taking advantage of birds’ inherent advantage over many of the world’s dangers—flight—by elevating one’s children above the crawling and unwinged? There are just a few such specialists of the soil who cling to the earth in both its richness and its dangers, and the red-eyed towhee is among them.
Red-eyes select well-concealed sites, with overhanging branches providing cover above and various grasses, ferns, and forbs providing cover from the sides. Artists of leaf litter and masters of their medium, they take advantage of that natural blanket of insulation and concealment by constructing the nest in a shallow depression so that its top is roughly even with the surrounding surface. As with many birds, an outer structural layer of sturdier stuff (bark, stiff leaves, stems) is lined with a cozy insulative layer (mostly grasses).
On the ground, you are more vulnerable to certain predators. But there are compensating advantages. The immediately functional one is to reduce the time needed before fledging: baby towhees spend about 10 days as immobile raccoon snacks before they start hopping around, while flight-dependent birds like hummingbirds or swallows will be confined to the nest for a full three weeks. But the fundamental advantage of ground-nesting is that it allows a bird to use habitats that would otherwise be off-limits, to take advantage of plentiful food resources in areas where tree-based nesting sites are not plentiful. If you’re a ground-feeding specialist like a towhee or quail, or more broadly a shorebird or shearwater, it wouldn’t make sense to evolve to nest in trees which would be scarce or nonexistent in perfectly viable foraging habitat. Red-eyes often live in scrub habitats with only short and stunted woody plants.
When they do inhabit areas well stocked with trees, red-eyed towhees will raise their nests into the low branches, varying their elevation depending on the balance of available nest sites and the dangers of the ground. Interestingly, California birds seem to be among the most ground-wedded of spotted towhees: studies from Monterey and San Francisco found over 90% of nests on the ground, while an Oregon study had only 69% and a particular Mexican population was entirely elevated (thought to be because of frequent flooding in the area). Red-eyes have the ability to build their nests in trees and shrubs, but are free of the typically inviolable necessity to do so.
Most birds fear and flee the soil. Trees are their great refuge. Only a handful of woodland songbirds will relax in safety on the ground. But the red-eyed towhees have their walls of branches, their curtains of down-hanging vegetation, the concealment of dappled darkness to match their own dark and spotted cloaks. In other words: birds specialize, and towhees specialize in the land beneath the shrubs and trees. No one else has the skills to extract food from this layer of detritus, to procure warmth for their children in the sloughed off waste of the trees, to find safety in the shadowed earth.
Conclusion: Ecology in the First Person
What do I suggest you remember about this bird? In outline, it might look like I had three subjects, respectable topics suitable to any textbook on natural history.
- The borders of biological species and genera can be mutable and subject to debate. Naming conventions may therefore either overemphasize or understate real evolutionary distances.
- Birds make various sounds that can be distinguished and catalogued—songs, calls, and “nonvocal sonations.”
- Evolution partitions resources among different organisms. Different bird species have thus evolved to maximally exploit niches of food sources and nest sites, in this case through development of a litter-scratching feeding technique and the construction of low-elevation nests.
All true enough, and well-enough illustrated by this towhee. But the whole point of my writing is to take the next step from textbook lessons, however interesting in the abstract, and turn them into the automatic context that you simply and unthinkingly feel when you encounter these birds. You could generalize them if you thought about them; if you went and read that ecology textbook you might recognize their broader applicability. But you start from the specific, because that’s how we live: we know the character of our friends before we study the principles of psychology. So instead:
- Of course, “red-eyed towhee” is her name—don’t you hear her saying “towhee”? Don’t you see those glaring globes of scarlet implacability?
- Of course I know when they’re around! I hear them talking at all hours and immediately recognize their voice, like that of any friend. That grumpy moaning is their normal tone. It lengthens, repeats, meets a response—sounds like a territorial squabble. The unending explosive rattles—a lonely bachelor. A loud scratching, invisible in the shrubbery—it couldn’t be anyone else.
- Ecological niches, resource partitioning, comparative advantage—call it whatever you like. Animals specialize because that is nature’s way of filling every little corner of the world with as much life as possible. The leaf litter is full of invisible seeds and scurrying centipedes and these red-eyed devils are nature’s strange and wonderful response to that hidden abundance! No one else can deal with that awkward and concealing accumulation of plant matter, so the world came up with this extravagant solution: a crazy kicker of stunning black, red, and white who moans and twangs to keep me company through all the days of my life.
Much of civilization’s collective knowledge of the world is contained within books and reports of resolute objectivity. (Or so it seems to their authors. As the years and centuries pass, the assumptions of every period tend to show themselves as the product of their time.) Humans write to other humans about non-humans, while trying as much as possible to efface their own personality, the personality of their readers, and any sense of the personable in their animal subjects. This method yields data and insight while limiting the tempting errors of our playful imaginations.
But in the end, that isn’t how we live. Ultimately, the value of any knowledge lies in how it shapes our understanding and our actions as biased, embodied individuals.
What is the amount of the discovery to me? It is not that I have got it in a bottle, that it has got a name in a book, but that I have a little fishy friend in a pond.
– Thoreau, The Journal, November 1858
Science is a fine thing, and if you have absorbed the various facts distributed through this essay like seeds in the leaf litter, I think the biologists need not feel that their efforts have gone unrecognized. I gratefully embrace their contributions! But the experiments and statistics, the hours of careful observation cautiously tethered to hypotheses, cannot be the end. The end we aim at is to put it all together, to reintegrate that knowledge into portraits of a thousand fishy friends.
Accumulated data does not make a gallery of portraits. Portraiture takes patience, to mature a sympathetic knowledge. When you understand a bird’s vocation, then a rustle in the leaves becomes a well-known and waving flag. When you’ve heard a thousand whining moans, you’ll find them turn to words and meaning. And when you peer into the shadows in search of that black visage, the face stamped upon your mind will make the red-eyed glare glow brighter.
Header image adapted from photo by Emilie Chen
Wonderful piece on our red-eyed neighbor & fabulous photos – thanks again, Jack!
Thank you Chris!
Spotted this magnificent towhee today 5/14 on the backside of Deer Island Loop trail. I was so surprised to see one after reading your article!
Thankkkk you for this article. I moved to a bird sanctuary on the west coast of Canada and couldn’t place the incessant trilling sound. I asked all the locals but not many people survey their lands, or notice the birds, it seems.
But it’s funny how much this piece feels like there are parallels to be drawn between birds and humans…
Beautiful, informative exploration. Exquisitely presented.