What’s that thing you spotted at the treeline?  Is spotted towhee, comrade.

Some articles out there will copy-paste the idea that spotted towhees are timid and hide from people, but I don’t think it’s actually true.  One time my husband nearly stepped on a spotted towhee while we were walking to the bus stop.  We had an amazing view of it.  Black hood and back, rusty blood red eyeball and flank, pale grey belly.  Larger than chickadees, more the typical size range of emberizid sparrows.  And of course, they have a lil’ spatter of pretty white spots.

They might just seem easy to miss because they favor thick, short trees – especially evergreen pines.  However, even in those trees, they aren’t too hard to spot, because they like to perch near the top.  One time I went to the beach at Dash Point and a towhee begged for food from us.  On another PNW beach, out on one the islands, I came across a bunch of short pines with a bunch of towhees in them – more than I’d ever seen before.

Spotted towhees are perching birds, which are united in having a very long backward-facing toe called the hallux.  They use this to grip tree branches.  Small passerines like this sometimes feed on the ground by poking through leaf litter, making little backward hops.  The hallux pushes the leaves apart, and they grab any grubs they see after the sweeping move.  My husband pointed one out to me that was doing this.  Since then I’ve also seen another species do it – I think dark-eyed juncos?

It makes me think of James Brown.  Jump back, wanna kiss myself.  Ungh!

But yes.  Spotted towhees.  Cute.  Common.  They screech like a little pterodactyl.  Sometimes they make a “cellphone” call similar to a dark-eyed junco.  Keep an ear out and you’re more likely to see them.  And enjoy.

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EDIT:  Forgot to mention, dark-eyed juncos have varied color over their range, but in the PNW, their colors are oddly similar to a spotted towhee.  They both have a cellphone call, and it makes me wonder, are our local juncos impersonating towhees?  This would be similar to how downy woodpeckers look like hairy woodpeckers, which has been postulated to help them benefit from the reputation of or avoid aggression from the larger birds.  Juncos being smaller than towhees, and locally more similar to them than elsewhere, the samey call…

If I had time to science it, I would attempt to observe if juncos make the cellphone call while doing anything else junco-ish, or while acting territorial.  Also whether juncos in other regions without the “oregon” markings make that call.  Or whether they look similar to other birds in their respective areas.  That kind of shit.

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I had no idea what I was seeing.  I had no idea when the day began that I’d be up a mountain, getting snowed on in October.  But it was a good time.  Canada jays are Perisoreus jays, which I think are more closely related to Eurasian magpies than to American jays?  I dunno.  I’m no scholar about this stuff.  It’s all google if I feel up to it.  But on my honeymoon, we randomly went up to a lookout at Hurricane Ridge, in the Olympic National Rainforest, and saw these birds.  Never before or since.

They’re bold.  I heard that they are so used to getting food from humans that you can hand feed them, and I regret not trying that while I was up there.  They seemed bold enough.  I saw one buzz within three feet of another hiker.  It took me a while to work out the ID.  I certainly hadn’t expected them to be corvids.  They seem a bit smaller than other jays, which themselves are smaller than crows.  Maybe about robin sized?  Mostly grey-white, a little bit of black around the back of the head and more on the wings.  Dark grey beak, dark button eyes.  Nice.

Based on where we were, this was most likely the “obscurus” subspecies, which sounds cool, whether or not it’s actually at all interesting.  It isn’t.  Pay it no nevermind.  To me, this bird will remain associated with my honeymoon, like ravens, like red-tailed hawk cries, like peacocks in the road.  Much more personally interesting, even if that doesn’t transmit to y’all.

I have to imagine that somebody in my readership has much more experience with them.  Holler at ya dogg.  I’d be interested to know more about them.

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Stellers Georg was some kinda colonial naturalist who mushroom-stamped his name on tons of beautiful and rare creatures, some of which were famously driven to extinction by colonizers.  The push to rename birds like the “steller’s jay” … I really hope it works out.  Fairly certain some needledick mosquitofucker from le Fed will firebomb any university that endorses it tho.  One thought on these guys was just to call them the stellar jay, which seems appropriate enough.  They are exemplary creatures, with a head black like the cosmos and white streaks for eyebrows like shooting stars.

These jays are the only ones I’ve ever seen in Federal Way.  No scrub jays up there, no blue jays in this part of the state.  No big deal!  Stellar jays are enough.  They are very deft and sprightly, bounding and elegantly flapping up and down the canopy, jacking your peanuts, screeching whenever it’s screeching time.  Jays are corvids, but next to crows, they are supermodels and olympic gymnasts.  And yet, who is dominating in the colonized landscape?  I favor this analogy – jay is to crow as gibbon is to human.  A gibbon is brightly colored and very talented, cute and cool and amazing.  But humans win.  Brute force and pointed sticks.

I’ve wondered before in the comment section of a much smarter person than myself, could stellar jays be the result of a hybridization event between crows and blue jays?  They look like a blue jay that slipped and fell in a puddle of crow black, immersing their upper body in it.  Hence another suggested name, the black-crested jay.  I know some very distantly related bird species can hybridize.  This happens more commonly with waterfowl than with perching birds.  Still, I’m less inclined to believe it now.  Blacker color schemes can easily arise by convergence, and there’s no reason to doubt that happened.  But if genetics prove that crank theory right someday, I will be crowing about it.  haha.  crow.

Can I get through even one of these posts without mentioning american crows?

Anyway, I’m now in a two-jay neighborhood, with both stellar jays and california scrub jays.  It’s very cool.  At least, it will be until the icecaps melt and my condo is below sea level.  Until that day, let the jays screech for me as often as they please.

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The peepingest marshmallow peeps.  A bug of a bird.  There’s a trend in evolution that the adaptable base of a family tree is drab brown things that lack extreme specializations.  Merely being a minuscule flying dinosaur is a pretty extreme specialization, but within that, there are some birds that are more flexible than others.  For all I know, a bushtit is so specialized they’ll go extinct when left-handed buttercups fall to invasive ultrageraniums.  But colorwise, this feels very basal.  Everybody knows tits (haha, heyo heyo) have strong black and white marks on their heads and showy songs, fierce attitude.  So how is this timid tittering beige bug-bird a tit?

I looked it up.  They are not tits at all!  They’re in a mostly Eastern Hemisphere group that includes other bushtits and long-tailed tits, which are not even in the same branch of Passerida as the bold and familiar tits.  Sheisty.  American bushtits are the only members of the clade in North America, in all their beige glory.

I can’t emphasize enough how drab these birds are.  What color is their head?  Slightly reddish beige.  No, slighter than that.  It’s the Lacroix of reddishness.  It’s essenced.  How about the belly?  Yellowish beige.  No.  Less yellowish than the reddish essence on the head.  It’s all beige, man.  With beady lil black eyes.  If you don’t demand color in your birds, this is a cute look.  They have a nice shape – a borb with a long tail, just about kinglet sized.  Puny as hell.  They fly like those practice footballs with the little rocket part sticking out the back, almost always in a small flock.

I don’t remember the first time I took note of them, but while working as a security guard way back in the elevatorgate era, I started noticing them flying from one short tree to another, usually in the winter and usually when it was less busy with traffic or people on foot.  I have seen them in other seasons.  Maybe they’re more obvious in winter because that’s when they flock the hardest?

They don’t even sing boldly.  They squeak, like a chickadee that isn’t brave enough to get past chicka.  Not a lot to say here.  Cute little birds are cute, but unremarkable.  This series calls for remark and now I remarked.  Mark another one down.  American Bushtit.

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