Pipilo maculatus

DSC_4342-s
Originally uploaded by pipilo

This spotted towhee just sat in these flowers screeching like a bicycle bell - no, higher and faster. Anyway, I got a nice photo of it with my D70 and 300 mm lens, even though it was pretty far away. I was reading on the web that it used to be called the rufous-sided towhee, but then people figured out it was different from the rufous-sided towhees on the east coast, so now it's called a spotted towhee and the one back east is appropriately called the eastern towhee. I guess that brown color is the "rufous" but I'm not really sure because rufous wasn't one of the colors in the Crayola box, not even in the 64-crayon box, as far as I can recall.

I walked today in the Torrey Pines Extension, a surprisingly large wilderness area in the middle of Del Mar east of the train tracks and north of Penasquitos Lagoon. I had only been to the Extension once before, a long time ago, and forgot how nice the views were looking across the lagoon to the beach. Also, it seems that you can get closer to more Torrey Pine trees at the Extension than you can on most of the trails in the main portion of Torrey Pines State Reserve. I'd like to go back there soon and explore more of the trails.