flycatcher time?

This should be flycatcher time -- i.e. time for empids and Olive-sided to be migrating through. But, unlike past years, I haven't seen any at all. I wonder if the hurricane damage has, by opening up many areas, cut down the insect populations on which these birds depend.

There are Eastern Wood-pewees back in the woods, Eastern Kingbirds by certain bodies of water and Eastern Phoebes here and there but the only flycatcher that seems to be consistent at our place is the Great Crested. This is the biggest of our flycatchers and the most striking with a gray breast, yellow belly, reddish primaries and tail and a whole series of laughing, scratchy calls that I hear all day long as it circumnavigates our woods. Myiarchus crinitus (its formal name) is one of a series of almost two dozen very similar tropical birds that extend from South America to, well, Long Island and points north. The Great Crested is a hole nester and it has the extraordinary habit of lining its nest hole with a shed snake skin. If it can't find a shed snake skin (they can't be all that easy to find around here), it will resort to a scrap of plastic wrap or even an old condom! Nobody really knows why it does this; the going theory is that the presence of a snake skin deters predators from investigating the nest hole. Well, maybe. In any case, Great Crested Flycatcher is a woodland species that has spread into inhabited areas where it will even use nest boxes. The easiest way to note the presence of these birds is to recognize its calls. As with other flycatchers, these calls are inherited not learned, are quite stereotyped and are species-specific. Although the Great Crested call is usually described as a rising 'weep', it actually has a little repertoire of scratchy, almost comic laughing calls that make me think of this bird as a stand-up, the court jester of the woods. It hunts inside the trees, usually at mid-canopy levels (sometimes quite high), darting out from a perch to capture its prey.

I think I have found the nest of the local pair of Fish Crows. It's located near the top of an ornamental evergreen in a neighbor's yard and, since calling and courting behavior is now at a minimum, I suspect the birds should be sitting on eggs.

Eric Salzman