Green-Tailed Towhees (Pipilo chlorurus) show up here in the Fall. They have a distinctive mewing call, a piping note, and a beautiful song. They occupy the same territory as the Abert's Towhee - stream sides, edges of watery areas, Mesquite. This is the mew.
This male Spotted (Rufous-Sided) Towhee (Pipilo maculatus) was sitting in a tree in Sedona, Arizona. He let me sit 6 feet from him while he sang these two variations. The first notes are a jay-like call, or mew, which he repeated for several minutes,then he started the second, which is a fantastic short song. The spectrogram shows his frequencies to exceed 11 KHz!
A second Spotted (Rufous-Sided) Towhee sits in a Juniper in Sedona. I'm including this one to show you how the same species in the same area can sing slightly different tunes.
