California Towhee sounds: song and calls

A California Towhee sounds like someone tapping a small metal pipe. Its signature call is a sharp, metallic chink, given over and over from under a shrub or the edge of a patio. The song is a run of those same squeaky chips on one pitch that speeds up into a rapid trill. Mated pairs also trade an excited, squealing duet. Listen all year in gardens, parks, chaparral and coastal scrub from southern Oregon through California.

What the song sounds like: chips that speed up

The song is built from the same note as the call. A male starts with three or four squeaky chips spaced out on one pitch, then runs them faster and faster until they blur into a trill, sometimes stuttering in the middle. It sounds less like a tune than like a dropped coin rattling to a stop. The details vary from region to region.

Most of that singing comes from males without a mate. One study found unmated males spent about 47 percent of their time singing, while paired males sang less than 1 percent of the time, so a towhee singing hard in spring is usually advertising for a partner. Towhees are also among the earliest risers in California, and they sing from shrubs, treetops, utility poles, roof ridges and even in flight.

The calls: a metallic chink and a squealing duet

The chink is the sound that gives this bird away. It is sharp, metallic and loud for a plain brown bird, and towhees use it constantly: to mark the day's comings and goings, to protest and to warn of a predator. One version hushes begging chicks and warns mates and fledglings of danger, and another is a contact note that lets a pair keep track of each other when both are hidden in the bushes. There is also a thin, drawn-out tseeee and some lispy notes.

The other sound to know is the duet: an excited, squealing burst of notes, often delivered by both birds of a pair together. Early in a partnership, pairs duet several times a day, and the squeals and chinks are often the only clue that two towhees are sitting in a hedge. Fights sound rougher. Rival towhees trade rapid, guttural notes, and a harsh distress call, the towhee squawk, is given when a bird is grabbed by a predator or used to intimidate a California Scrub-Jay.

When and where you hear it

California Towhees live along the Pacific coast from southern Oregon to the tip of Baja California, and they are permanent residents that rarely move far from where they nest. That makes the chink a year-round sound across most of coastal California, in backyards and city parks, chaparral, coastal sage scrub, streamside thickets, oak woodland edges and pinyon-juniper. They are most abundant in the coastal lowlands and scarce in forested high mountains and on open desert floors.

Pairs may stay together for life, five years or more, and keep the same territory all year, and both partners defend it. The male is especially combative toward rival males and will even attack his own reflection. A towhee squaring off lowers its head, raises its tail and circles with fluttering wings, sometimes holding out a small stick as a threat.

They feed mostly on the ground, scratching through leaf litter with both feet, and readily come to feeders, especially for seed that falls underneath. The diet is mostly weed seeds and grain, with insects in summer, berries, and sometimes garden fruit such as apricots, plums and grapes. Nests are bulky cups in a dense shrub or low tree, usually 4 to 12 feet up, and a pair can raise two or three broods a year. Because it calls all year from shrubs near houses, this is a card Warble players in California can catch in any month.

What it looks like

About the size of a robin, 8.3 to 9.8 inches long, and plain: dusty brown all over with a long, rounded tail and a dark bill with a paler lower half. Look for warm cinnamon under the tail and a buffy throat edged by a broken ring of dark spots. Males and females look alike. It was once treated as the same species as the Canyon Towhee of the interior Southwest, which has a dark breast spot, but their ranges have never been known to overlap. A small subspecies of Inyo County, the Inyo California Towhee, was listed as threatened after its streamside habitat was damaged, and its numbers have since increased.

Birds that sound similar

• 
  Wrentit

  The Wrentit's song also accelerates into a trill, peep peep peep-pee-pee-peepeepeprrrr, from the same chaparral, but its notes are musical rather than metallic and the trill drops in pitch at the end. Its call is a dry growl, never a chink.

• 
  Spotted Towhee

  Shares the brush and scratches the same leaf litter, but its call is an inquisitive, mewing meewww? and its song a long, buzzy cheweeeee. A sharp metal chink from the bushes means California Towhee.

Where the California Towhee card lives

In Warble the same bird can be an easy card in one state and a prized one in another, because each album ranks its birds by how often people really report them there. The California Towhee appears in 1 state albums:

Questions people ask

Written by the Warble team from the sources above. Updated October 14, 2026.