Field Guide to North American Flycatchers: Empidonax and Pewees
Book by Cin-Ty Lee & illus, by Andrew Birch.
Princeton. 2023. 157p. flexbound. $19.95.
John A. Timour, library director at Thomas Jefferson University, where I worked for 25+ years, had a knack for colorful, amusing, and indicative phrases. One of them described the work of catalogers: excruciating detailed minutia. That applies very well here with these near identical flycatchers, including Cuban Pewee and Olive-sided Flycatcher (considered a pewee).
17 species are dealt with featuring the splendid paintings by Birch. Remarkable also are the beautiful range maps with 5 colors, isobar lines for separate date periods, and political boundaries within Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. They are works of art in their own right. Broken out from many of these are charts for 4-5 areas depicting the month-by-month occurrence.
By combining disparate features it is possible to ID many of these away from their breeding grounds, where song (extended call, really), habitat, and date give a dead lock on ID otherwise. Hard to reduce all of this to tabular form, but “the field mark matrix” on p. 43 summarizes much of what is in the text, showing for all 17:
crown shape, forehead angle, bill length, lower mandible, tail length, tail width, primary projection, wingbar contrast, wing panel contrast, eye-ring, upper/under contrast, wing flicking, and tail flicking and characterizes each of these, as appropriate, as strong, medium, weak, often, occasional, wide, medium, etc. These attributes are, of course, further explained in the splendid text.
Many will be relieved that the Pacific-slope and Cordilleran flycatchers, split from Western fly not so long ago, have again been combined, but are nevertheless treated separately here. Let’s hope that such as Thayer’s Gull will still be lumped with Iceland Gull. But the 2 willet forms will likely be split soon. (?) Evolution we know is continuing and splitting is the order of the day most of the time.
Away from their breeding grounds silent Alder and Willow flycatchers are mostly just listed by us as Traill’s Flycatchers, as they were before being split, based originally by their very different “songs” in Connecticut. Flycatchers are not song birds, but their extended calls serve much the same purpose. Even in the hand Willow & Alder flys are next to impossible to separate.
Folded wing patterns are shown for many where appropriate as well as sonograms. The wing pattern diagrams are even more important in separating Old World warblers, a challenge we don’t have here. There is a good bibliography and, most important, 4 “useful websites”, all of them geared to the all-important vocalizations.
In spite of all this impressive detail, and the authors admit it, there will be individuals that cannot be IDd, even by the most astute and detail-oriented, the most forensic of us.
In some of the paintings the birds appear a bit too pudgy. The text might have emphasized more the relatively shorter legs of the pewees (compared to empids), and the less whitish wingbars of juvenile birds. Someone more discriminating than I am maintains the Acadian and Alder flycatchers on p. vi are the same painting.
But, highly recommended. Future titles will deal with kingbirds and Myiarchus flycatchers. In this era of splitting we are up against a broad suite of groups difficult to identify: some of the peeps, storm-petrels, albatrosses, shearwaters, hummingbirds, Bicknell’s vs. Gray-cheeked thrushes, various gulls, the Solitary Vireo complex, and more. Throw in rampant hybridization in gulls, waterfowl, Carolina vs. Black-capped chickadees, not-so-rampant hybridization in warblers, etc., and we see that birding is challenging.
Complicating things even more is vagrancy; Shape, length, and back color serve well to separate the 5 (or 4) eastern empids, even if you are not a bander, but if you get a western stray, then what? But … that is part of the allure of our activities. Not being able to ID everything keeps the aura of mystery alive, frustrating as that may be. Being able to ID difficult taxa is a triumph.
Harry Armistead.