564 U.S. NATIONAL MUSEUM BULLETIN 237 part i 



to life in thicket and tangle. * * * He spends most of his life in 

 thicket, 'scrub' or sprout land, and so the bushy lands of Marthas 

 Vineyard and Cape Cod are favorite resorts. He is not a dooryard 

 bird except in winter, when necessity now and then drives one to a 

 feeding station, but even then he spends most of his time in the shrub- 

 bery, coming out only to secure food. He may be found along bushy 

 fences and roadsides, and often finds food or sand in country roads." 

 B. H. Warren (1890) states that they occasionally "visit potato vines 

 and other plants on which the destructive Colorado potato-beetle 

 feeds." 



F. M. Chapman (1932), writing of the "southern race" of the towhee, 

 comments that it "does not associate with the northern bird, which is 

 abundant in the south in the winter. The latter selects haunts of 

 much the same nature as those in which it passes the summer, while 

 the southern bird lives in heavy growths of scrub palmetto." 



My own experiences in the Gainesville region (where Chapman 

 spent much of his time) and elsewhere over the entire range of 

 P. e. alleni do not confirm Chapman's observations. Racially mixed 

 flocks do occur in winter, and frequently. P. e. alleni is quite com- 

 monly found in habitats other than that of scrub palmetto. Sand- 

 pine {Pinus clausa) scrub in both the coastal dune and "Big Scrub" 

 areas of Florida have this white-eyed towhee as a very conspicuous 

 element along with the Florida Jay Aphelocoma c. coerulescens. 

 When I spent a summer on Cape Cod, Mass., I was impressed by 

 the obvious gross similarity of the species preferred habitats there and 

 in Florida. The habitat of birds from near the type locality of 

 P. e. canaster (Mobile, Ala.) and P. e. rileyi (Brunswick, Ga.) do 

 not differ radically from those in which the towhee is abundant in 

 peninsular Florida. In my experience, the species frequents early 

 serai stages in both xeric and mesic successions, and whenever ruderal 

 conditions approximate these natural situations one can usually 

 expect to find towhees in abundance. 



Courtship. — Few comments have been made on the species' court- 

 ship behavior. J. J. Murray (MS.) writes of his observations 

 on Elliott's Knob, Augusta County, and Lexington, Va. "Late 

 in the afternoon I heard a towhee call and then saw him fly to the 

 top of a bush. He then spread his tail into a fan with the white 

 spots showing distinctly, raised his wings, and fluffed out his feathers 

 until in the fog he looked twice his natural size. Almost at once a 

 female appeared in a nearby bush. At another time, in my yard 

 at Lexington, on October 22d, I saw a male, all alone, go through what 

 was similar to a courtship display. Restlessly flying from branch to 

 branch and from bush to bush, with fluttering wings and tail, he paused 



