A Surprise Encounter

Yesterday's cold front finally made it bearable to get out to our local park in the evening for a four or five mile walk. In a spot not far from where Robert and I saw the chuck-will's-widow a couple of months ago, there was a bird at the top of a tree and singing like crazy. We don't generally bring binoculars, so we were limited in the visual cues we could take from it, but it was colored like and acting like a flycatcher of some sort (the tail wagging was a big behavioral clue).

When we got home, after spending a lot of time listening to various recordings of a bunch of different birds, we finally found a good match in one of the empidonax flycatchers. The empids are famously similar to the eye and are among the most challenging birds to identify. Sibley, National Geographic, and other popular, well-respected field guides often say that you should not even try to distinguish some of the empids if you didn't hear it sing or call. (Hence a good number of one's birding lists will have a long list of specific birds and then that frustrating record "Empidonax species".) If we had not heard the bird, we would not even have attempted to ID it.

But after much comparison and consideration, we finally decided that we had been hearing the alder flycatcher (which you can hear at that site for yourself). We had heard both the song and the call (the "pit" notes) from our guy. We checked some resources and found that the alder flycatcher does migrate through the Austin area at this time of year, which was reassuring.

This painting by Louis Agassiz Fuertes (circa 1908) shows two wood peewees at the top and then four different empid species below. Our bird was like the second bird on the left, who appears to be preparing to peck out the eyes of a troubled least flycatcher.



The best part is that neither of had seen the species before. So: thus was ABA Life Bird #447 Alder Flycatcher added to my list.

Of course, we could be wrong. Perhaps it was another of the empids and we did a poor job comparing the songs. This is why I am so reassured when I see and identify a bird species for the second time.