A note on the name, because almost everyone gets it wrong including a good many field guides in their early editions. The bird is Abert's Towhee, not Albert's. It is named for James William Abert, a nineteenth-century US Army topographical engineer who surveyed the Southwest and collected natural history specimens while he was at it.

It is also one of the most geographically restricted songbirds in the United States. Abert's Towhee lives almost entirely in the Sonoran Desert lowlands along the Colorado, Gila and Salt river systems, and it depends on dense riparian thickets. Strip the cottonwood and mesquite out of a desert river and the species disappears from it, which is why so much of its historical range has quietly gone.

That makes a bird like this one at a constructed wetland more significant than it looks. Places like the Gilbert Water Ranch function as replacement habitat for a species that lost most of the real thing to water management, and the towhees using them are not a casual sighting.