Green-tailed Towhee | Pipilo chlorurus

Voice

The male's song is a long, jumbled series of clear whistles and trills lasting about two and a half seconds; at the height of the breeding season he delivers up to twelve songs a minute. The contact call is a thin, high mew that rises in pitch, used by both sexes while foraging, on leaving the nest and in flight. When threatened the bird gives a sharp, repeated tick.

Identification

A small towhee with a rufous crown, a grey head and neck, a sharply outlined white throat with a white moustache stripe, and olive-green upperparts with yellow-green edges to wing and tail. The underparts are grey and unstreaked. The female is slightly duller than the male. The bird forages on the ground with a forward hop and a simultaneous backward scratch with both feet, and raises its crown feathers when excited.

Confusion species

No other North American sparrow combines a rufous crown with a white throat and green wings and tail. American Tree Sparrow also has a rufous crown, but is streaked brown, smaller and has a dark breast spot. Green-tailed Towhee is considerably smaller than the other towhees and, unlike them, has no brown or black upperparts. In dense scrub you hear it before you see it; the rising mew differs from the flatter mew of Spotted Towhee.

Habitat

Dense, low shrub in the western mountains, often with scattered trees or cacti: sagebrush steppe with chokecherry, mountain mahogany and juniper, and shrub regrowth on ground opened up by wildfire. It breeds from the lowlands to about 3000 metres. In winter it drops below 1200 metres into dry arroyos (dry, steep-sided gullies that carry water only after rain), mesquite thickets, oak-juniper woodland and desert grassland.

Range and movements

Breeds in the western United States, from eastern Washington and Idaho through Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah and Colorado south to California, Arizona and New Mexico. All of the world population spends part of the year in the United States and 61 per cent winters in Mexico, roughly from Sonora and Chihuahua south to Jalisco, Michoacán, Hidalgo and Oaxaca, plus the Baja California peninsula. Small numbers stay in southern California, central Arizona and West Texas. Vagrants have reached Manitoba and Nova Scotia.

• Resident
• Breeding (summer)
• Winter
• Passage
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

Where and when to look

Look for it in May and June on a sagebrush slope or in an old burn, where males sing from the top of a shrub. Later in the season it keeps mostly to the ground; the rising mew from a bush gives it away, and waiting a moment for it to appear on the shrub top usually suffices. Then look at the crown and throat rather than the green, which reads as grey in shade.

Conservation

The species is listed as Least Concern (LC). Partners in Flight puts the breeding population at 4.1 million birds; the Breeding Bird Survey showed a stable trend between 1966 and 2014. The pressure lies in the condition of the sagebrush steppe: grazing, conversion to cropland and an altered fire regime remove the shrub layer or burn it too often. Because the species benefits from shrub regrowth in the first years after a fire, fire management largely sets how much breeding habitat exists.

Scientific name

Pipilo chlorurus | (Audubon, 1839)

John James Audubon described the species in 1839 as Fringilla chlorura; because it later moved to Pipilo, author and year stand in parentheses. The genus Pipilo was introduced in 1816 by Louis Pierre Vieillot, from Latin pipilo 'to chirp'. The species name chlorurus is from Greek khlōros 'green' and -ouros '-tailed', hence 'green-tail' — the same meaning as the English and Dutch names. The type locality was later fixed at Ross' Creek near Blackfoot, Bingham County, Idaho.