The Old Brown Towhee…

…is poised to become even less what it used to be.

When I was a young birder, California and Canyon Towhees were still “lumped” as Brown Towhee, surely the least inspired of all North American bird names. The split came twenty years ago, on the basis of the usual biochemical studies; for birders, this was an “intuitive” split, too, since the two taxa differ so notably in their vocalizations and, to a lesser extent, in appearance.

Now there’s another split in the offing, this time at the level of genus. If the proposal before the AOU Check-list Committee passes, the brownish towhees and west Mexico’s very towhee-like Rusty-crowned Ground-Sparrow will be assigned to the resurrected genus Pyrgisoma, while the “rufous-sided” towhees will continue to occupy the genus Pipilo.

Pyrgisoma was the original generic home of the Rusty-crowned Ground-Sparrow, described in 1851 by Bonaparte. “Pyrgita” is an old synonym for Passer, making Bonaparte’s genus name mean something like “sparrow-bodied bird”–not much better than “Brown Towhee”!

You can read more about the upcoming split (and about the long-overdue dismantlement of my favorite sparrow genus, too) in Paul Hess’s invariably wonderful and too modestly named “News and Notes” in the new Birding.