Female Eastern Towhee, Day Brook Pond, Kennebunk Plains Wildlife Management Area, ME

There are Eastern Towhees calling all around Day Brook Pond. I have never heard as many in any one location. For some reason the ones I see around the pond are mostly females or young males, and they are only giving the rising “chewink” whistle call…though I hear the occasional adult male (presumed) singing it’s “drink-your-tea-tea-tea” song from further out in the plain or deeper in the forest. Until 1995 the Eastern and Spotted Towhee (common in the west) were considered one species…Rufous-sided Towhee…and there is still some debate. Hybrids certainly appear in the contact zone…and there is a third distinct, pale-eyed, variety found in Florida, which might be hybridizing with southern Towhees in their contact zone…producing or blending with at least one more recognized sub-species. Complicated. I suspect much more complicated from our point of view than from the Towhees’. 🙂

The emphatic call of the Towhee is one the things that makes Day Brook Pond seem so alive this season. It is simple and clean. The very essence of uncomplicated. I think sometimes, in our efforts to categorize and quantify nature, we obscure as much as we elucidate. There is more than one way to understand nature. When we approach nature as a problem to be solved…a puzzle with a solution…then the call of the Towhee, the color of its eye, the extent of rufous on the breast, etc. become “evidence” for our theories…particulars for our enumerated construct of reality. I don’t mean to imply that that diminishes the Towhee in any way. Science is an important way of understanding the world. But it is not the only way. Appreciation is also understanding. Immersion is also understanding. The clean clear chewink that draws the eye to the brown and while bird in the dappled light of a birch or maple…that draws the mind to contact and the heart to joy…that awakes the spirit to a delight in life and living…that is a valid understanding of reality, even the particular reality of the Towhee, as well.

It is tempting to put the mind and science on one side and the heart and immersion on the other…but that is not the way we are made. The spirit is always seeking life, seeking understanding…and it seeks through naming and enumeration just as it seeks through appreciation and contact. As long as we do not become focused on one way of understanding to the exclusion of the other, then we will grow ever more alive…and the Towhee will grow in its meaning for us…its meaning to us…and every encounter will be richer, more vivid, more full of life. And that is how it ought to be…what the spirit of creation in us is striving in us to create. God, the creator, is good. Happy Sunday.