tropical birds in our backyard

If you ask someone -- even a knowledgeable birder -- to name some tropical birds that hang around our backyard they would probably start with the Scarlet Tanager and Ruby-throated Hummingbird. Not that these answers would be completely wrong. Tanagers and hummingbirds are two big groups of birds in the American tropics of which only a few species have managed to get north of the border and both of these fit the image of exotic colorful tropical birds (although it turns out that the Scarlet Tanager is probably not a tanager at all but a kind of cardinal!). In any case, there's another, much larger group of species that might seem drab and everyday but truly deserve to be called tropical.

Flycatchers are the biggest bird family in the Western hemisphere and there are almost 400 kinds. When the Panama land bridge reconnected North and South America, the flycatchers were the only native South American 'suboscines' to make it north. What are suboscines? They are a primitive category of songbird which include the many woodcreepers, ovenbirds, antibirds, antipittas and tapaculos, tityras, cotingas, manakins and other truly exotic South American specialties which still dominate the tropical forests and intrigue birders and ornithologists who venture south of the border. Why none of these guys made it north while at least three dozen flycatchers reached our borders is a mystery. But because they did, we have (for at least part of the year) our Kingbird, Phoebe, Pewee and Great Crested Flycatcher not to mention the Willow Flycatcher and its Empidonax cousins, Least, Alder, Acadian and Yellow-bellied, that come through here in migration and present some of the best and most extreme challenges to local bird-watchers. We also get the Boreal Pewee, otherwise known as Olive-sided Flycatcher, as a migrant on its way north. All of these birds go back south in the winter and some of the western and southwestern species occasionally get their compasses out of whack and end up here instead of in the tropics; Montauk is a good place to find these strays (although I once had a Scissor-tailed Flycatcher fly across my windshield while driving on the LIE!). Perhaps the most spectacular example of a flycatcher stray is the Fork-tailed Flycatcher. Birds that breed in the southern temperate zone migrate north in big numbers during the austral winter (that would be our summer) and occasionally overshoot their mark and end up in, of all places, Long Island.

Are the Eastern Kingbirds still working on their nest down at the shore? I haven't seen them for a couple of mornings so either they are quietly sitting on eggs or they have been driven away by the pesky crows who are all over the place these days. I'm hoping it's the former and not the latter.

Eric Salzman