Your friendly neighborhood phoebe

By BILL CHAISSON
Of a Feather
Flycatchers are not songbirds. They look like songbirds, because they are small, relatively common, and fly around in your garden and yard. But they do not actually sing. They have their characteristic calls and a couple of them – the pewee and the phoebe – are even named for their distinctive vocalizations.

Most of the flycatchers are green and gray with the occasional blush of yellow, but the eastern kingbird has a slate-blue back and a brilliantly white breast and belly. The scissor-tailed flycatcher, found mostly along the roadsides of Texas, in addition to its exuberant tail is mostly white and tinged with salmon-pink.

One of the more familiar flycatchers is the phoebe. While most of this tribe build a standard cup-shaped nest in a shrub somewhere, the phoebe is addicted placing its domicile on man-made structures. Ornithologists (bird scientists) assume that before man-made structures existed, the phoebe must have placed its nest on sheltered rock outcrops. (They have the same thoughts about barn swallows.) But since there have been barns, sheds, bridges, and houses, phoebes have been moving in for the season.

The phoebe is among the most modestly attired of birds. Its head, back, and tail are a soft, dark grayish green. Its chest is sooty gray tainted with sage. Its belly is a sort of off white. It has no wingbars, no patches of color anywhere, no stripes on the head, and even its eyes are a a demure dark brown.

But the phoebe has personality. For one thing, it is a tail flicker. Flycatchers actually do catch flies (and other flying insects) and their method is to sit on an exposed branch and sally out to snatch them out of the air, often with an audible snap of the bill. But they never sit still while they are waiting for their next meal. They jerk their tail feathers up and down at entirely irregular intervals, giving them the appearance of being impatient, but trying to appear as if they are not impatient.

In keeping with this attempt at buttoned-down behavior, they also sit around and produce a simple, nasal “fee-bee” all day long, and when startled or upset emit odd sound along the lines of “enk.”

Furthermore, phoebes raise their young as a pair, so after the nest is built you will often see the two birds (which are identical) traveling back and forth to their eggs and then their young. It gives the appearance of a couple that does everything together. Phoebes make it look like a progressive marriage – you imagine they are friends as well as mates – rather than simply codependent. Perhaps it is the complete lack of flashiness in their appearance and the modest, yet earnest and business-like way of going about their domestic affairs that makes one visualize a couple of Volvo-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, all-natural-fiber-preferring post-hippies with sound, responsible green investments.

The phoebe nest itself is a cup and is placed on a horizontal ledge under an overhang. The one underneath my mother’s back porch is larger than you would think they’d need and decorated with lichens. The birds are skittish at the beginning of the nesting season and before they lay their eggs they will abandon a location if it is too busy. But in a nice illustration of the conservation of resources in an evolutionary strategy, as the birds’ investment grows – eggs are laid, eggs are hatched, and nestlings are fed – they are less and less inclined to go elsewhere and eventually they become downright bold. At a certain point in the process it become untenable to start over again and the birds devote themselves to carrying the project through.