Given I live in northeastern Minnesota, I rarely see towhees. Just a few minutes yesterday morning before I took the video included with this post, I watched another towhee and listened to its call. Minutes later I heard the same call, and found this individual! Don’t forget that the Merlin App (my review), which is from the Cornell School of Ornithology, is also a great tool in that it will help you learn bird songs.

Anyhow, I learned one the call of the Spotted Towhee, then heard another and these images and video were the result (video link for email subscribers)

The other bird of the day for me was what most folks out here would consider common, a slate colored junco (dark-eyed junco). However, even though the “scientific powers that be” in the birding world do not consider this Oregon junco variant a different species, browse to this post to view just how different the plumage is for this western junco (same species) as my local Minnesota bird.

Slate-Colored Junco – Oregon Plumage

All the photographs in today’s post were taken during drizzle conditions yesterday. While being out in the rain might not see like much fun, if one can keep the drab sky out of photographs, colors are often very intense on wet days.