I'm sure this is a common bird but I'm not sure what it is....I've tentatively identified it as a young great crested flycatcher....but it seems smaller than the 8+" my book indicates....
This is a tough one. I would vote for a juvenile Eastern Wood-Pewee based on the "clean, buffy wing-bars, dark head, and weak eye-ring" (Sibley, p. 323). The Eastern Phoebe has weak wing-bars and I think these are too strongly demarked for a phoebe. Anyway, seabird biologists don't know much about flyctachers, so any other ideas?!!!
This is tough bird to Id from this angle, buffy wingbars, weak eyering and color of chest would suggest an Eastern Wood-Pewee...but bill on this bird is all black suggesting an Eastern Pheobe, where Pewee's have a black bill above and yellow below. Best guess for me though would be a Eastern Wood-Pewee.
Hmmm....I've looked at your suggested species and still can't decide, altho the size fits better. This one definitely has a black bill....here's another angle, but I'm not sure it's going to help....I tried to remove some yellowish/green color cast from this one, so its color looks a bit different....
Thank you, John. Maybe the juveniles have black beaks?? Also, my book says they typically forage high up in trees.....ummm, not here!! Maybe it's a Western Wood-Pewee?? LOL! Anyway, I've never before knowingly seen one of these guys, so it's a new bird for me - that's always cool.
So I think the jury is still out on this one with the bill the way it is, and so are we back to Axel's suggestion of a phoebe? It has the phoebe's "smudge on the side of the breast" as Sibley calls it, and a black bill. On the negative side, the main problem is that wing-bars are much too pronounced for a phoebe and the wings look too long to me (but that just may be me).
I just took a look at Peterson's and he said that the pewee has 2 narrow white wing bars and phoebes might have dull wing bars, particularly young birds (so does Sibley). This one has a hint of a yellow gape. Could it be a juvenile Eastern phoebe?
Could be a young phoebe Beth. Key behavioural feature is that phoebes flick their tail constantly. So Anita- did you see this tail-flicking? Another difference is that phoebes tend to be in edge habitats and pewees in the forest.
I didn't notice tail-flicking but it was far enough away that I wasn't really observing it, except to get it in my lens focus. It was on tthe edge of a treeless prairie pasture. I was actually trying to get young bluebirds in my sites and initially thought it was a bluebird. My Audubon book says that phoebes have no eyering; this one clearly has an eyering. Also, the phoebe appears not to have well-defined edges on its feathers like this one does; looks more like the peewee in that way, except for the beak....
I am not an expert about this species but look at its black beak. To me this guy looks a lot to the Western Wood-Pewee Contopus virens, let me know your thoughts
It's a young Eastern Phoebe. They have buffy wingbars and, as mentioned, if you look carefully you can see the pale gape at the base of the bill indicating that it is a young bird. Pewees always show some pale area on the lower mandible. This bird's all black bill is also conical shaped, just what we would expect of a phoebe. A pewee's bill has a flatter profile with a finer pointed tip.
This bird also exhibits the classic long attenuated tail of the phoebe and the dark head and lores contrasting with the paler back of the phoebe. Don't confuse the light bare skin surrounding the eye with a feathered eyering. Neither pewees nor phoebes show much of an eyering though pewees tend to exhibit more.
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