Pennsylvania Game News - August 2013 - 54

other flycatchers. Otherwise, its back,
head and wings are dark, grayish olive,
and it has pale wingbars, whitish or pale
yellow underparts, a dull white throat,
and a bill with a black upper mandible
and a dull orange lower mandible.
Like all flycatchers, it sits upright on
a branch in the middle canopy, sallies
forth after flying insects, snaps one up,
and returns to its perch. In our woods,
the great crested flycatcher uses a higher perch than the eastern wood-pewee,
while the Acadian flycatcher and then
the least flycatcher are perched below
the pewee.
Of course, it would be rare to find all
of them hawking insects in the same vicinity, even though the eastern woodpewee seems to be a generalist as far as
habitat is concerned, using both edge
and suburban habitats, open, wooded
riparian and/or drier areas, eastern
deciduous forest, orchards, open pine
woodlands in the South, and mixed
hardwood-conifer northern forest.
In Pennsylvania we “have a high
proportion of the species’ North
American population,” according
to the Second Atlas of Breeding Birds
in Pennsylvania. The eastern woodpewee was found in 88 percent of
the breeding blocks, but was “absent
from some higher elevation blocks in
densely forested northern mountains”
and also largely “absent from the large
and treeless expanses in the Piedmont
Province” and tends to avoid our
areas of coniferous forest. Altogether,
though, ornithologists estimate that we
have 315,000 singing males during the
breeding season.
Eastern wood-pewees are one of the
latest migrants to arrive here, probably
in part because they spend their winters
in South America from northwestern
54

Colombia and northeastern Venezuela
to southern Peru, northern Bolivia and
Amazonian Brazil. Whether they are
day or nighttime migrants is still debatable, but Mike Lanzone, who has been
studying the songs of nocturnal migrants, says they are mainly nocturnal.
“Evidence is very strong simply from
the fact that they show up in good
numbers at dawn where they were
not the day before. Also, I have heard
them predawn with other nocturnal
migrants, not singing but making their
tanager-like chip call,” Lanzone says.
Other researchers have found that they
are killed at television towers at night.
Usually, I hear the first eastern woodpewee the first week in May and by the
second week, when I am participating
in the North American Migration
Count, I record as many as five singing
males on our property. Apparently, they
need territories anywhere from five and
a half acres to 19 acres in size, which
they defend by chasing off at least 17
songbird species while singing. They
also may change their singing patterns
by not singing when other species — or
their own — are singing. On the other
hand, they don’t mind sharing their
territories with least and great crested
flycatchers.
Males do chase females and feed
them during courtship, but so far there
has been no detailed description of
courtship or mating. Roy Ickes, writing in the Atlas of Breeding Birds in
Pennsylvania, reported that the first
nest-building was recorded on May
20, with parents carrying food for their
young from June 3 until September 4.
Back on August 28, 2011, I watched
an eastern wood-pewee feeding two
hollering fledglings on a tree branch.
Nest-building is thought to last
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Pennsylvania Game News - August 2013

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