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California Towhee

Melozone crissalis
CALT · Passerellidae · New World Sparrows
Grassland provisional · from avonet
345heard

The California towhee (Melozone crissalis) is a bird of the family Passerellidae, native to the coastal regions of western Oregon and California in the United States and Baja California Sur in Mexico. The taxonomy of this species has been debated. At the higher level, some authors place the towhees in the family Fringillidae. Within the group, there has been debate about whether the distinction between this species and the similar canyon towhee (Melozone fuscus) should be at the specific or subspecific level. The…

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)

California Towhee
DickDaniels (http://carolinabirds.org/)CC BY-SA 3.0
345Detections
3Days heard
0.78Mean confidence
15 AugFirst heard
24 SepLast heard
1,338Stations worldwide

By hour of day

00061218

Counts reflect vocal activity and ambient noise, not abundance.

Recent days

15 Aug 24 Sep

Daily counts. Seasonal bars replace this once there is a year of records to draw them from.

Where heard

At home1 detections
On outings344 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.

2026-08-15 07:12
9 s
Away
1.00
2026-08-15 07:11
9 s
Away
1.00
2026-08-15 07:11
9 s
Away
1.00
2026-08-15 07:11
9 s
Away
1.00
2026-08-15 07:11
9 s
Away
1.00
2026-08-15 07:12
9 s
Away
0.99
2026-08-15 07:12
9 s
Away
0.99
2026-08-15 07:12
9 s
Away
0.99
2026-08-15 07:11
9 s
Away
0.99
2026-08-15 07:11
9 s
Away
0.99
2026-08-16 06:11
9 s
Away
0.99
2026-08-15 07:12
9 s
Away
0.99
Station PUC-29278 on BirdWeather Data updated 27 Sep, 1:00pm Archive