The Great and Crested Unseen

Of A Feather
Bill Chaisson
What is relatively large, fairly colorful, very loud, but very hard to see? There are a lot of answers to that question, if you are a birdwatcher. But the current answer for me is the great crested flycatcher (Myiarchus crinitus). One of my neighbors, who is also a birdwatcher, alerted me to its presence. I had been hearing its odd call, but it hadn’t really registered as a flycatcher. I had been thinking of it as one of those weird noises that red-bellied woodpeckers make.

It isn’t really one noise, but a variety of noises that present as one drawn-out vowel sound with a half expressed consonant sound at the start and a more definite one at the end. Variations include yeeet, yeewp, and breer or breeyr. (Sibley hears them as queEEEP, wheeep, and KREEEP and krrriip.) These utterances are made at no fixed interval and invariably from very high up in the canopy, and I mean inside the canopy.

The trees in my neighborhood are a collection of mature deciduous (oak, maple, ash) and coniferous (white pine and hemlock) species, many of them a good 60 to 80 feet tall. The canopy is relatively continuous, but it is interrupted here and there by houses and their attendant lawns. It does, however, close over our cabin; when I look up through the skylights, I see mostly leaves and I do not see a great crested flycatcher.

M. crinitus prefers a forest with breaks in the canopy, which allows it to do its flycatching. It has therefore benefited from the ex-urbanization phenomenon, which is the tendency of former suburbanites to buy several acres of land and then plunk a house down right in the middle of it. Most people will surround it with about an acre of lawn, driveway, and place to park their stuff or even put in a pool. Many birds, like most wood warblers, vireos, and M. crinitus’s cousin, the eastern wood pewee (not to mention a lot of other animals) shy away from this sort of interruption to the forest ecosystem, but not the great crested flycatcher.

Myiarchus has four other members, but they are mostly subtropical, except for the ash-throated flycatcher (M. cinerascens), which is the great crested flycatcher’s western counterpart. At 7 to 8.5 inches long, myiarchids are all larger than most other species called flycatchers and either the same size or slightly smaller than kingbirds, but with the tendency to be slimmer and with less robust bills.

M. crinitus is the most brightly colored member of its genus. The back and nape are olive green, and the wings are dark, but the wing feathers are edged with white and the primaries are washed with rufous. The tail too is rufous, especially below. The face and chest are dark gray, and the belly and tail coverts are bright yellow. It resembles several of the western kingbird species but has more contrasting and brightly colored wings, and it has different habitat preference and a range that overlaps only that of the western kingbird (Tyrannus verticalis) in the Great Plains states.

The crest is not as pronounced as that of a blue jay or cardinal. It presents as more of a piled-up mass of feathers at the back of the crown (like that of a kingbird). If you are lucky enough to witness territorial defense encounters, the birds pump their heads up and down like lizards and raise their crests at each other.

One habit distinguishes myiarchids from all other flycatcher species: they are obligate hole-nesters. Rather than excavate their own nest sites, they use natural cavities and those dug by other animals, including woodpeckers. Writing in 1942, Arthur Cleveland Bent noted that the species “does not seem to

fear the presence of man and has learned to nest in a variety of man-made structures—nesting boxes… hollow posts… a stove pipe or open gutter pipe, or any old tin can or box of proper size….”

The female builds the nest while the male “supervises,” and the construction is an elaborate affair. It can be quite bulky if the cavity is large, because the cup where the 5 to 6 eggs are laid must be only a foot below the opening. Bent makes the following list of materials: “grass, pine needles, small twigs, leaves, petioles, hair (from dogs, cats, squirrels, rabbits, cattle, horses), feathers (from poultry or native birds), bark fibers, rootlets, string, strands from rope, seed pods, cloth and paper, pieces of onion skin, cellophane, duct tape and other plastic trash, pieces of horse manure, and pieces of shed snakeskin.”

The last is the most famous and much studied component. Research has shown that nests that incorporate snakeskins are less likely to suffer predation by flying squirrels, in particular, but other mammals, in general. Some researchers, however, do not support this adaptive explanation, but maintain that the birds are merely drawn to crinkly, shiny objects, pointing to the frequent presence of cellophane and onion skins.

I have not seen my neighborhood great crested flycatchers because they rarely descend from the top of the canopy and almost never alight on the ground itself. It is reported that if fledglings end up on the ground, the parent birds will feed one, but then fly up to a nearby branch and descend to the next, rather than hopping or walking from one to the other.

According to Vera Herbert and Kimball Elkins, writing in Atlas of Breeding Birds in New Hampshire, the young fledge in July and roam the forest with their parents—who become generally silent—and they all depart in August or September. They winter in Cuba, southern Mexico, Central America and northern South America, where they remain until April.