Called also: DUSKY FLYCATCHER; BRIDGE PEWEE; WATER PEWEE;
[EASTERN PHOEBE, AOU 1998]
Length -- 7 inches. About an inch longer than the English
sparrow.
Male and Female -- Dusky olive -- brown above darkest on head,
Which is slightly crested. Wings and tail dusky, the outer
edges of some tail feathers whitish. Dingy yellowish white
underneath. Bill and feet black.
Range -- North America, from Newfoundland to the South Atlantic
States, and westward to the Rockies. Winters south of the
Carolinas, into Mexico, Central America, and the West Indies.
Migrations -- March. October. Common summer resident.
The earliest representative of the flycatcher family to come out of the
tropics where insect life fairly swarms and teems, what does the friendly
little phoebe find to attract him to the north in March while his prospective
dinners must all be still in embryo? He looks dejected, it is true, as he sits
solitary and silent on some projecting bare limb in the garden, awaiting the
coming of his tardy mate; nevertheless, the date of his return will not vary
by more than a few days in a given locality year after year. Why birds that
are mated for life, as these are said to be, and such devoted lovers, should
not travel together on their journey north, is another of the many mysteries
of bird-life awaiting solution.
The reunited, happy couple go about the garden and outbuildings like
domesticated wrens, investigating the crannies on piazzas, where people may be
coming and going, and boldly entering barn-lofts to find a suitable site for
the nest that it must take much of both time and skill to build.
Pewit, phoebe, phoebe; pewit, phoebe, they contentedly but rather monotonously
sing as they investigate all the sites in the neighborhood. Presently a
location is chosen under a beam or rafter, and the work of collecting moss and
mud for the foundation and hair and feathers or wool to line the exquisite
little home begins. But the labor is done cheerfully, with many a sally in
midair either to let off superfluous high spirits or to catch a morsel on the
wing, and with many a vivacious outburst of what by courtesy only we may name
a song.
When not domesticated, as these birds are rapidly becoming, the phoebes dearly
love a cool, wet woodland retreat. Here they hunt and bathe; here they also
build in a rocky bank or ledge of rocks or underneath a bridge, but always
with clever adaptation of their nest to its surroundings, out of which it
seems a natural growth. It is one of the most finished, beautiful nests ever
found.
A pair of phoebes become attached to a spot where they have once nested; they
never stray far from it, and return to it regularly, though they may not again
occupy the old nest. This is because it soon becomes infested with lice from
the hen's feathers used in lining it, for which reason too close relationship
with this friendly bird-neighbor is discouraged by thrifty housekeepers. When
the baby birds have come out from the four or six little white eggs, their
helpless bodies are mercilessly attacked by parasites, and are often so
enfeebled that half the brood die. The next season another nest will be built
near the first, the following summer still another, until it would appear that
a colony of birds had made their homes in the place.
Throughout the long summer -- for as the phoebe is the first flycatcher to
come, so it is the last to go -- the bird is a tireless hunter of insects,
which it catches on the wing with a sharp click of its beak like the other
members of its dexterous family.
Say's Phoebe (Sayornis saya) is the Western representative of the Eastern
species, which it resembles in coloring and many of its habits. It is the bird
of the open plains, a tireless hunter in midair sallies from an isolated
perch, and has the same vibrating motion of the tail that the Eastern phoebe
indulges in when excited. This bird differs chiefly in its lighter coloring,
but not in habits, from the black pewee of the Pacific slope.