{"id":170239,"date":"2025-12-01T06:36:16","date_gmt":"2025-12-01T13:36:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=170239"},"modified":"2025-12-01T07:55:55","modified_gmt":"2025-12-01T14:55:55","slug":"three-days-with-a-spotted-towhee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2025\/12\/01\/three-days-with-a-spotted-towhee\/","title":{"rendered":"Four Days With A Spotted Towhee"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week I spent parts of four mornings with what I believe to be the same Spotted Towhee. Each time I arrived at the same clump of bushes just before sunrise, only to find that ‘he’ wasn’t there. But each time, within a few minutes to half an hour, he’d show up.<\/p>\n

Following is a collection of photos from all four mornings.<\/p>\n

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I never knew from where he came but he always first appeared fairly high up in the bushes, which in my experience is unusual for Spotted Towhees. Usually I see them on the ground, foraging for food.<\/p>\n

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This time he was so far off the ground I made a mental note of how far. My estimation was that it was about 7′.<\/p>\n

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But he always ended up foraging for food on the ground, in the mix of green vegetation and dead leaves right in front of the dense thicket of bushes.<\/p>\n

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As he searched for specific spots to forage he was twitchy and fast. He often flicked one of his wings as he was doing so. His eye looks a little funky because his nictitating membrane was at least partially closed.<\/p>\n

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I didn’t notice it until I was processing these photos but it was always his…<\/p>\n

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left wing that he flicked. I doubt it was because he is sinistral (left-handed), but you never know. Some birds are known to exhibit handedness.<\/p>\n

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This was the only time I caught him jumping to a new foraging spot.<\/p>\n

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In this shot it looks like he’s holding still and maybe he was for a microsecond or so. But look closely. There’s flying debris in front of and just below the base of his tail because he’d been scratching for food.<\/p>\n

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Spotted Towhees typically use “bilateral scratching” to uncover food, meaning they scratch backwards with both feet at the same time.<\/p>\n

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Their bilateral scratching often sends lots of debris flying behind them. Here we see a dark, dead leaf and other debris flying behind him.<\/p>\n

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Occasionally he’d scratch in the same spot for long enough to dig a hole that he started to disappear in. Sometimes I could only see the top of him in one of the holes.<\/p>\n

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This photo is a little soft but it was the only time I could see what he was eating.<\/p>\n

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His frenetic feeding activity often attracted the attention of other birds, including robins and three species of sparrows (House, Song and White-crowned). Here we see the towhee and a robin eyeballing each other.<\/p>\n

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Here he’s caught in the middle between a nosy robin at upper right and a White-crowned Sparrow at lower left.<\/p>\n

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This was one of my favorite photos of him, in part because it was the closest he ever got to me.<\/p>\n

In those four days I took several thousand photos of him but many of them were quite similar. For today’s post I attempted to give my readers as much variety in poses and behavior as I could.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Notes: <\/em><\/p>\n

On three occasions a second towhee showed up but the two birds never got along so one of them always chased the other one off. I mention this because it’s possible that one or more of these photos is of the second towhee. When there was two of them it was very hard to keep track of which bird was which.<\/em><\/p>\n

I believe both towhees have now moved on. I haven’t seen either one on my last two trips to the clump of bushes.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week I spent parts of four mornings with what I believe to be the same Spotted Towhee. (15 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":170252,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[334,392,2473],"tags":[5621,4836,7900,2474,311],"class_list":["post-170239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-spotted-towhees","tag-bilateral-scratching","tag-foraging-for-food","tag-sinistral","tag-spotted-towhee","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/spotted-towhee-0981-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-IhN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=170239"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170239\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":170311,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170239\/revisions\/170311"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/170252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}