Wednesday, July 22, 2020 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon Featured Volunteer 3 Liz Weeks Sisters Country birds By Douglas Beall Correspondent The Green-tailed Towhee [pipilo chlorurus], with its distinctive rust crest, is a somewhat secretive ground- nesting bird. On occasion a Towhee uses porcupine hair to line its nest, where it lays four to six pale blue, heav- ily spotted eggs which hatch in 11 to 14 days. The chicks will begin foraging in 11 to 14 days. This Towhee will protect its nest by raising its tail and skittering off mim- icking a ground squirrel to distract predators. As a ground forager, it spends most of its time on the ground or in thick cover, scratching about industriously in the leaf lit- ter, often under Manzanita so it may go unnoticed. But its catlike mewing call, which it often gives from a brushy perch, is one of the quintessential sounds of the shrublands of the east slope of the Cascades. The Green-tailed Towhee is the smallest and only entirely migratory towhee. Their scientific name roughly translates to