Most of the Savannas Preserve State Park looks like this, open grassland with slash pine and saw palmetto plus some wetlands. I walked there with a friend yesterday and we looked for birds.

In a scrubby area, we heard a rustling in the bushes and a loud whistled call with a rising note. I somehow managed to focus my camera into the tangle.

Eastern Towhee, a large New World sparrow. It’s the second one I’ve ever seen. The first was a female in May 2016 in our old New Hampshire backyard: My first towhee.

This one’s a male. Cornell Lab of Ornithology…

Males are striking: bold sooty black above and on the breast, with warm rufous sides and white on the belly. Females have the same pattern, but are rich brown where the males are black.

Eastern Towhees are characteristic birds of forest edges, overgrown fields and woodlands, and scrubby backyards or thickets. The most important habitat qualities seem to be dense shrub cover with plenty of leaf litter for the towhees to scratch around in.

Towhees eat many foods: seeds, fruits, insects, spiders, millipedes, centipedes, and snails, as well as soft leaf and flower buds in spring. They also eat seeds and fruits, including ragweeds, smartweeds, grasses, acorns, blackberries, blueberries, wheat, corn, and oats.

And from the Audubon Field Guide…

Sometimes secretive but often common, this bird may be noticed first by the sound of industrious scratching in the leaf-litter under dense thickets. In the nesting season, males become bolder, singing from high perches. In some areas this bird is commonly known as “Chewink,” after the sound of its callnote. In parts of the Southeast and Florida, the towhees have white eyes.

More on the song/ call from Wikipedia…

The song is a short drink your teeeeea lasting around one second, starting with a sharp call (“drink!”) and ending with a short trill “teeeeea”. The name “towhee” is onomatopoeic description of one of the towhee’s most common calls, a short two-part call rising in pitch and sometimes also called a “chewink” call.