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Spotted Towhee

Pipilo maculatus
SPTO · Passerellidae · New World Sparrows
Forest provisional · from avonet
2heard

The spotted towhee (Pipilo maculatus) is a large New World sparrow. The taxonomy of the towhees has been debated in recent decades, and until 1995 this bird and the eastern towhee were considered a single species, the rufous-sided towhee. Literature before 1995 referred to the spotted towhee as a rufous-sided towhee that resides in the western United States. An archaic name for the spotted towhee is the Oregon towhee (Pipilo maculatus oregonus). The call may be harsher and more varied than for the eastern…

Wikipedia ↗
mean confidence
10–11 in wingspanestimated

Wingspan and trait data: Fox et al. (2026), CC BY 4.0; incorporating AVONET (Tobias et al. 2022) and BirdWingData (Shiomi et al. 2025)

Spotted Towhee
Hamma085CC BY-SA 4.0
2Detections
1Days heard
0.64Mean confidence
17 AugFirst heard
17 AugLast heard
2,756Stations worldwide

By hour of day

00061218

Counts reflect vocal activity and ambient noise, not abundance.

Recent days

Not enough history A seasonal chart needs a year of records. This shows daily counts until then.

Where heard

At home2 detections
On outings0 detections

Home and away are counted separately everywhere except here.

Where it lives

Breeding and resident range, from BirdWeather. Not where you have heard it — that is the map on the Outings page.

Leaflet · CARTO · range polygons from BirdWeather

Recordings

Highest-confidence detections first. Confidence is a threshold, not a probability of being correct.

2026-08-17 19:49
9 s
0.67
2026-08-17 19:49
9 s
0.60
Station PUC-29278 on BirdWeather Data updated 27 Sep, 10:15am Archive