Maybe I have just not had my ears on all these years here on Goose Creek.
The Towhee is one of the most common birds we share our space with, and a bird that doesn’t mind getting close to human habitations. There’s been one just below my window since first light doing the chicken-scratch/jump back thing under our foundation plantings.
But until this morning, I never heard one alternate between TWO different Drink YOUR Tea calls, one the characteristic whistled YOUR and the second, a buzzy trill.
Any other bird brains out there run across this variation of call? Is it my one virtuosic bird that does this or a common melodic phenomenon?
Click this link to listen; I cut out silent space between calls, and left the creek noise in the background of this 6 second clip.
Not that I am familiar with your towhee (and I had to go into an old guide to find it…Seems they separated it into two species at some point, spotted and eastern), but I found this on-line…
Very useful, Gary, and I will now know to pay closer attention to variations that are signatures of individual birds–at least until they toss one combo for another and I think it is suddenly a different bird. At any rate, all of this does make one pay closer attention to the “ordinary” sounds we too often do not attend.
I love the towhees! I have one male that seems to have lost its mate. I am supposing that some predator caught her since they are ground nesting. This makes me sad as I hear his calls throughout the day. He sounds so forlorn! His territory is shifting further and further from the house, now. He is in competition with another male whose mate is nesting in the palmettos near the pier. We are on our second nesting periods here with most of our birds.