Gotcha!

We've been hearing a bird in our shrubbery for the past couple of months, but haven't been able to identify it.

The bird has a distinctive song that starts out with a couple of higher notes and then resolves into a lower trill.  After hearing this song for some time, we finally spotted a small grayish bird that seemed to be the one singing this song, but never got a really good look at it, let alone a picture of it.

The best description we could come up with was:  small, about the size of a sparrow, grayish or brownish color, a bit darker on the back than on the chest and with an upturned tail.  Since the bird was usually hopping around in the neighbors' trumpet creeper vine, that was about the best description we could come up with.

I tried searching all the likely members of the Passeriformes order on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology All About Birds website, including sparrows, wrens and bushtits, but nothing seemed even close to the song we were hearing, until I got to the last bird on the list, the Wrentit.  That's the song, and the description fits:  small songbird, dull grayish brown, long tail, short bill, and "difficult to see as it skulks through the dense scrub."

Yep, that's our bird.