Eastern Towhee

The Eastern Towhee is a big, long-tailed sparrow of thickets and brushy edges, and the male is hard to mistake: a black hood and back, rufous sides and a white belly, with the black ending in a clean line across the breast. The folded wing shows a small white patch and a pale edge, and the long, rounded tail has white corners that flash as the bird flies off. The bill is black and cone-shaped.

Most sightings start with a sound: a chewink from somewhere out of view, or dry leaves rustling under a shrub as though something much bigger were moving about. In spring, males climb to sing from a high perch, which is the best chance of a clear look.

Eastern Towhees are 6.8 to 8.2 inches (17-21 cm) long, with a wingspan of 7.9 to 11 inches (20-28 cm), and weigh 1.1 to 1.8 ounces (32-52 g). That is about twice the weight of a Song Sparrow, but smaller than an American Robin. The shape is chunky, with a thick, triangular bill and a long tail.

The female has the male's pattern in warm brown: brown hood, back, wings and tail, similar rufous sides and the same white belly, and a little less white in the wing and tail.

Males look sharpest in spring. Their fresh black feathers have chestnut fringes in fall, and these wear away over the winter to leave the bird blacker and glossier.

Juveniles look nothing like their parents. They are cinnamon-brown above and buffy below, heavily streaked on the back, breast and flanks with a plain pale center to the belly, and are seen mainly from May to August. The size and the long, dark tail with white corners tell them from streaky sparrows. By about September a molt has given them an adult-like look, though young males can be duller, with a brown wash, and first-fall birds still have brown eyes.

Across the North and the Midwest, adult towhees have red eyes. On the Florida peninsula the eye is whitish or pale straw, and across parts of the far Southeast it can be yellow or orange, with a mixed band running from southern Alabama to southeast North Carolina.¹ Birders call these two groups Red-eyed and White-eyed, and between them they hold four subspecies.

Florida peninsula birds are also paler and shorter-winged, with much less white in the tail. The white spot on the outer tail feather averages about 0.75 inch (19 mm) on Florida males and about 1.5 inches (38 mm) on northern males.²

Spotted Towhee. The closest lookalike, and until 1995 the same species: together they were the Rufous-sided Towhee. They meet along river valleys on the Great Plains and sometimes interbreed there. Pure birds of both kinds are common in that zone.³ A Spotted Towhee has bold white spots on its back and wings. An Eastern Towhee has a plain black or brown back and only the small white wing mark, although a few birds far from the Plains show a little white on the shoulder or wing coverts.

American Robin. Bigger, with a gray back, a red-orange breast right across the front and a yellow bill. A towhee's rufous is only on its sides, with a white belly between.

Baltimore Oriole. A male is also black-hooded, but flame-orange below, with a white wing bar and a long, pointed bill, and it feeds high in trees rather than on the ground.

Rose-breasted Grosbeak. A male has a black head and back, a white belly, a red chevron down its breast and a very large bill. Females are brown and heavily streaked, with a pale stripe above the eye.

Dark-eyed Junco. Much smaller, with a pale pink bill. Eastern birds are slate gray and white, with no rufous on the sides.

Streaky sparrows. A juvenile towhee can pass for a Song Sparrow until you see its size and long, dark, white-cornered tail.

The song is a short phrase, usually written as drink-your-tea: one to three sharp opening notes, then a ringing trill. It varies a lot from bird to bird. The opening notes carry further than the trill and seem to work as an attention-getter for the trill that follows.^{2, 4} Within a bout, a male sings about 9.6 songs a minute on average.⁵ Neighbors often alternate, each answering the other.

The call gave the bird its names: towhee, chewink and joree all copy it. Both sexes and all ages give it, in every season but mostly when breeding, and mainly in alarm. It changes across the range: a clear, slurred chwee in the North, a hoarser version on the mid-Gulf coast, and a clear whistled swee in Florida.

Two other common calls are worth learning: a thin lisp that keeps pairs and groups in touch, barely audible beyond a few yards, and a sharp, abrupt tic of alarm.

Each male keeps a small set of song types, singing one for a while before moving to the next. Florida birds, which stay all year, average 8 types and New York birds, which migrate, average 3.5, and Florida neighbors share far more of them: 45% of 130 song types were shared by local males, against 5% of 409 in New York.⁶

A young male has to hear it done. One raised alone from the egg never sang a normal towhee song, even by his second spring; his song stayed harsher and slower, with no trills.⁷ Rarely, towhees borrow from other birds, working parts of Carolina Wren and Field Sparrow songs into their own⁸ and copying the alarm calls of Blue Jays, Brown Thrashers and American Robins.⁹

Migrant males start singing when they reach their breeding grounds. Birds that stay for the winter can begin in March, and Florida residents start up in February and March. Song ends around the start of the molt, in late July or early August.

Singing peaks around sunrise and again, less strongly, toward sunset, and in New Jersey males began about 65 minutes before sunrise in open pine-oak woods and 37 minutes before in shady oak forest.¹⁰ Males usually sing from a high, exposed perch, as much as 60 feet (18 m) up, and sometimes from the ground.

Males also have a soft, rambling quiet song, for up to 20 minutes at a time, given while feeding or from a low perch, often after a dispute; females rarely sing at all.²

Eastern Towhees breed across the eastern US and just into southern Canada, from southern Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec and northern New England south to the Gulf Coast and Florida, and west to eastern Nebraska, Kansas and Louisiana. They are missing from the Florida Keys.

What they need is dense, low cover over deep leaf litter, in many kinds of place: old-field thickets, forest edges and clearings, pine barrens, oak scrub, swamp margins and overgrown yards. Numbers are highest where shrubs are growing back, in old fields and after fire, and they thin out as the trees close over. On mountains they favor dry, sunny slopes, reaching about 6,500 feet (1,980 m) in the Appalachians.

Listen first. A chewink, a song from a shrub top or leaves being kicked about will tell you where to look, and the place to look is at ground level, under the shrubs. Be patient at a brushy edge: a bird that crosses a gap shows those white tail corners.

Northern towhees mostly head south for the winter, while birds of the Southeast and the Gulf states largely stay put. Migrants travel at night. They reach northern states from late April to early May, males first, and leave from mid-September to mid-October. Most do not reach the Southeast until mid-October, when they join the residents.

Banding records suggest two routes: 42 of 45 from the Northeast wintered between Virginia and Florida, and 13 of 16 from the Midwest between Kentucky and the Gulf Coast.²

In winter the range reaches north to southern New England, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois, and west to eastern Texas, with most birds in the southern states. A few stay farther north, usually near feeders, and more do so in mild winters.

Towhees eat small animals from the leaf litter alongside seeds and fruit, and the balance shifts through the year. Spring and summer bring beetles, grasshoppers and crickets, caterpillars and moths, ants, bugs, spiders, millipedes and snails. From late summer the diet turns to ragweed, smartweed and grass seeds, acorns, blackberries and blueberries, with some wheat, corn and oats.

In old stomach samples from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, plant food made up 41% to 64% of the diet from March to June, depending on region and month; in fall it was 61% in the Midwest and about 97% in the Northeast and Southeast, though those two samples were small.²

What a towhee eats also depends on what is there. In New Jersey pine barrens, where ants were the commonest arthropods in the litter, they made up 40% of what adults ate in early summer; in oak forest, with fewer ants, none turned up in the diet.¹⁰

The towhee's signature move is a two-footed scratch: a small hop forward, then a hop backward that rakes both feet through the leaf litter at once and uncovers whatever is underneath. It is the commonest way they find food in fall and winter in the Northeast.

They seldom feed far from cover. In late spring and summer both sexes also climb into shrubs and trees after insects, especially caterpillars: in Massachusetts pine barrens, 26.5% of the males' foraging moves and 19.6% of the females' were above the ground.¹¹ They look awkward up there, and can lose their balance on thin, springy twigs. Large prey gets shaken or beaten against the ground or a perch before it is eaten.

Towhees visit yards with brushy, overgrown borders. They take seed on the ground or a platform: sunflower seed, cracked corn, millet and peanut hearts. Scatter it close to cover rather than filling a hanging feeder, and leave the fallen leaves under your shrubs, which is where they naturally feed.

In the Northeast the nest is usually on the ground, sunk into the leaf litter up to its rim at the base of a shrub or grass clump, but in the Southeast it is most often above ground. Those higher nests sit in a vine tangle, briar or shrub, usually under 5 feet (1.5 m) and occasionally up to 18 feet (5.5 m). The share varies: 95% of 59 New Jersey nests were on the ground, but only 53% of 19 in Kentucky.^{2, 12} Renests and second broods are also more likely to be off the ground.

The female alone builds it, taking up to 5 days. She uses bark strips, dead leaves, stems, twigs and pine needles, sometimes string or even cardboard, around a lining of fine grass and rootlets, sometimes with hair. The finished nest is about 4 inches (10 cm) across.

Laying starts in late March or early April in Florida and Georgia, in mid to late April in Illinois and southern Ohio, and not until mid-May in northern New England. Most breeding is over by late July, though a few eggs turn up into August.

A male at first chases a new female, then within days is keeping close to her, and she starts the nest about a week after they pair. Pairs appear to be monogamous and stay together through the season, and one banded pair shared a territory for at least 3 seasons, though one male with two mates is on record.²

A clutch is 2 to 6 eggs, usually 3 to 5. Averages include 3.6 in Indiana (19 nests), 3.4 in New Jersey (16) and 2.4 in Florida (11).² New Jersey clutches were bigger in food-rich oak forest than in dry, sandy barrens.¹³

The eggs are pale, anything from gray or pink to cream or a faint green, thickly speckled with brown and reddish brown, often in a ring at the large end. The female incubates alone for 12 or 13 days, and the male warns her of trouble with his calls.

Both parents feed the young, mostly on caterpillars, other insects and spiders, with some fruit later on. In Kentucky, parents made 53 food deliveries in 19.4 hours of watching, 41.5% of them by the male.¹⁴ The young leave at 10 to 11 days old, or as early as 7 or 8 if disturbed, and are fed for another 3 to 4 weeks. One New York pair split the fledglings between them, each adult tending its own.²

Guides give one to three broods a year, but the evidence is thin, because a pair that renests after a failure is easily counted as raising a second brood. In New Jersey, 7 of 14 oak forest pairs tried a second brood after a successful first, and none was known to in pine barrens; in Kentucky, 1 of 6 pairs did.²

Most nests that fail are lost to predators, and ground nests are exposed. New Jersey pairs lost 73% of 11 nests in pine-oak woods and 31% of 13 in oak forest, and a New York site lost 88% of 17.¹⁰ Known nest robbers include bullsnakes, rat snakes, garter snakes and eastern chipmunks. Both parents scold and mob, and a flushed female may run off in a crouch with her tail dragging to draw an intruder away.

Towhees are common hosts of the Brown-headed Cowbird, and they accept the eggs. Older studies found cowbird eggs in 13 of 24 nests in Pennsylvania¹⁵ and 21 of 42 in Wisconsin,¹⁶ but only 4 of 81 in Massachusetts and 2 of 58 in New Jersey and New York.² Those counts date from 1947 to 1969, so they may not match today's rates.

Towhees nearly always hop, on the ground and through branches. On a longer flight the wingbeats come in slight jerks or dips. A disturbed bird goes only a short way, almost stalling, with its tail opening and closing.

Males hold territories with song, chases and fights. In New Jersey territories averaged about 4 acres (1.6 ha) in oak forest, while a crowded Massachusetts pine barrens population averaged about two-thirds of an acre (0.26 ha).^{10, 17} Evenly matched rivals fly up chest to chest, grappling with their feet, then tumble down and carry on, sometimes ignoring a person standing close by. A wing raised and quivered, or a fanned tail, works as a threat, and a subordinate male may carry a leaf or twig about.

In summer they keep to themselves or to pairs. Migrants and winter birds form loose flocks: in Kentucky they averaged 17 birds, about three-quarters of them males, often mixed with juncos, sparrows, cardinals and titmice.¹⁸ Towhees bathe in shallow water, or in leaves wet with dew where water is scarce.

Parental instinct can misfire: one male spent more than 5 days feeding young at a Wood Thrush nest.¹⁹

The oldest Eastern Towhee on the US Bird Banding Laboratory's list was at least 9 years old: banded in South Carolina in March 1937, and caught and released there in March 1946.²⁰ A 1987 list gave a wild South Carolina male at least 12 years and 3 months,²¹ but that bird is not on the list today.

Most live far shorter lives. About 58% of adults survived each year in a Pennsylvania woodlot.²² Birds start breeding in their second year. Adults are taken by Sharp-shinned and Cooper's Hawks, Short-eared Owls and Loggerhead Shrikes.

The Eastern Towhee is common, but it is in long-term decline. The North American Breeding Bird Survey puts the fall at 1.56% a year since 1966, a statistically clear drop of about 60%, and numbers have dropped by about 24% since 2015 alone.²³ Declines are significant in 24 states and sharpest in the Northeast, where New Jersey and Massachusetts each lose about 3.9% a year, and only Iowa and Kansas show a clear rise.²³

Partners in Flight estimated about 29 million birds around 2010, before that recent fall, and scores the species 13 out of 20 for continental concern, on its Orange Watch List and as a Tipping Point species.²⁴ The IUCN Red List still has it as Least Concern, last assessed in 2021: its range and numbers are huge, and the decline was judged too slow to reach the threshold for a threatened species.²⁵

Towhees need the shrubby stage between field and forest, so their numbers have followed the land. Abandoned farms grew into thickets and suited them, then those thickets aged into forest, and from the mid-1940s the spread of suburbs made the decline worse; near houses, ground nests also face cats, raccoons and Blue Jays, and more cowbirds.² By the early 1990s, northeastern numbers were only about 13% of 1966 levels.²⁶

Keeping young shrubland is what helps. In Florida, densities were highest about 4 years after a fire, then fell where fire was kept out.²⁷ On Nantucket, mowing cut towhee numbers but prescribed burning did not.²⁸