Re: [cobirds] Mystery Songster at Waneka Lake, The Answer Revealed at Last

More on crazy towhees.

Listen to this one from Boulder County earlier this year:

https://www.xeno-canto.org/534770

It's like it's two totally different birds! Long recording, but you need to hear the whole thing to get a full sense of what's going on.

Here's one from Alamosa County that can't decide whether it's not an eastern towhee:

https://www.xeno-canto.org/320564

And on and on and on it goes with this species.

Ted Floyd
Lafayette, Boulder County


On Thursday, June 18, 2020 at 6:32:42 AM UTC-6, Eric DeFonso wrote:

I know I'm a bit late to the game - I've been out in the wilds of Colorado doing socially-distanced bird surveys for the Bird Conservancy once again this year. This is a great recording that Ted has shared, and I wanted to amplify the point he makes in sharing it by sharing a similarly perplexing recording I made 6 years ago while on another one of these field seasons that I'm doing.

This is a Spotted Towhee recording I made in Yellowjacket Canyon way down southwest near the Utah border in Montezuma County back on May 31, 2014, while searching for resident Lucy's Warblers. When I first heard it, like Ted in his situation I wasn't sure what I was going to find since it was unlike anything I'd been expecting to hear. But on closer approach I was able to confirm the ID visually and easily, as the bird was perched quite noticeably atop a shrub. My recording is only 30 seconds, but the bird continued to sing this variant for pretty much the entire duration of my visit to the area, which was well over 90 minutes.

https://www.xeno-canto.org/205868

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Eric DeFonso
near Lyons, Boulder County, CO

On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 8:59 PM Ted Floyd <tedfl...@gmail.com> wrote:

Alrighty, y'all, what everybody's been wondering about for the past 48 hours . . .

So . . . Every guess here at COBirds was wrong, although two late entrants got the bird in the right family. Over at Facebook, all the guesses were likewise wrong, with nobody even getting the mystery songster to the right family. I am aware of guesses from the following avian families:

Scolopacidae (sandpipers)

Tyrannidae (flycatchers)
Corvidae (crows, jays)

Turdidae (thrushes, robins)
Mimidae (catbirds, thrashers, mockingbirds)

Fringillidae (finches)
Icteridae (blackbirds)
Passerellidae (sparrows)
Parulidae (warblers)

So who got it in the right family? Donald Jones and Maureen Blackford. Good job! However, the bird wasn't a song sparrow.

 

Folks wrote to me offline, too, and one of them got it all the way to species. Our winner is . . . Christian Nunes, who correctly recognized this as the song of the endlessly protean spotted towhee.

While I have you, here's how the saga unfolded on my end. When I first heard the song, at some distance, I wondered if the bird was going to be a blue jay. We have this whack-job blue jay at Waneka who frequently imitates Swainson hawks, ospreys, I believe, and maybe even red-winged blackbirds. So, for those of who thought it was a blue jay: Same here. But, then, as I got closer, I started to semi-seriously consider the possibility that this was going to be Colorado's second rufous-collared sparrow—and the third for the east flank of the Rockies in the USA. So I was in the right family—of course with that intangible yet critical advantage of actually being in the field with the bird. Finally, as I neared the bird, which I eventually saw up close and personal, something clicked, and I was pretty sure it was going to be a spotted towhee. Again, the imponderable essence of being there.

Thanks to all of you for playing along, and congrats to Christian. Next time I see you in person, I owe you a bottle of kombucha and a sack of orange slices.

Ted Floyd

Lafayette, Boulder County

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