California Towhee

California Towhee photo 2-3-towhee3274_zps55c3d55b.jpg
This plain brown bird is one of my favorites, because it goes through the tomato patch every morning all summer long and eats every single tomato horn worm it finds.  Plain brown can be beautiful!

Comments

  1. Soooo. . . . the towhee is not the bird who knows exactly when my tomatoes are perfectly ripe, and puts one beaky peck-hole in the Brandywine, or Cherokee Purple, or Pink Berkeley Tie-Dye that would have been in my salad that evening?

    If not him/her, then who??

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    1. Never a single peck here. Towhees are not fruit eaters. Mockingbird perhaps? They would strip my blueberry plants if I did not encase them in screening.

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    2. Robins are the main berry eaters here (St. Louis), but I've never been able to see who pecks my tomatoes.

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    3. We have a robin or three every year, but here they are just passing through on their way to somewhere else.

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  2. I would call him taupe: in my mind, a very elegant shade of almost-brown.

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  3. I think my favorite birds are the little brown jobs. Around here, song sparrows and bushtits are major brown insect consumers, with winter juncos and chickadees helping. Occasionally we get a towhee, but usually it's the rufous-sided.

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    1. My brother-in-law the ornithologist often refers to the scientific term LBB -- little brown bird.

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  4. Oh, I would love a bird that did that too. Those horn worms are scary. What a great garden helper.

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    1. They also fluff mulch. How could I not love that?

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  5. very well-trained! wish i had them - luckily i've only had one or two tomatoes pecked by the local birds here (mostly wrens, mockingbirds and blue jays). i try and get them before fully ripe so as not to tempt them too much. the same cannot be said for my anna apples - the birds go nuts over them as well as the nasty codling moth larvae!

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