Empidonax virescens
Order Passeriformes
Family Tyrannidae
Subfamily Fluvicolinae
Other names: Green-crested Flycatcher
Acadian Flycatcher
Adult.— Upper parts dark gray; back tinged in strong light with greenish; wing-bars buff or buffy-white; under parts white, tinged with sulphur-yellow, shaded on the breast with grayish or greenish.
Nest, on a limb, from four to twenty feet up, shallow, pensile, of rootlets, grass, and plant stems, loosely put together.
Eggs, creamy-wbite, spotted with brown.
The Green-crested Flycatcher is a locally common summer resident in the lower Hudson Valley as far north as Sing Sing, and in New Jersey as far north as Plainfield, but occurs in New England only as an accidental visitor. It arrives in May, and generally leaves in August. It frequents woodland and orchards, especially in the neighborhood of small streams. The sharp call-note, queep, and the song, which Bendire writes wick-up’ and Chapman pee-eyuk’, are characteristic; these notes, the larger size, and the buffy wing-bars distinguish the Green-crested from the Least Flycatcher.
Hoffmann – A Guide to the Birds of New England and Eastern New York (1904)
The Acadian or Small Green crested Flycatcher was first brought to my notice in the spring of 1891, at which time, two nests of three eggs each were found. Then, for three successive years, although I searched diligently, no sign of the species was to be discovered. In 1895, a number of nests were found and examined, most of which contained eggs. Again in the present year, (1896) I found this Flycatcher to be fairly abundant.
While not a common bird, it is probably of more frequent occurrence than is generally known, and some few notes may prove of interest to members of the I.O.А.
The Acadian Flycatcher is rare in New England, and seems rather to be a bird of the middle portion of the United States, embracing the territory drained by the Mississippi river system. The bird breeds throughout the northern portion of its range, and winters south to Mexico. The name also, Acadian, is not geographically correct, as may be seen from the foregoing habitat.
In form and general coloration it is similar to Traill’s Flycatcher the latter.
Like the Traill’s Flycatcher, it is of retiring habits, and is even more seclusive, frequenting dark shady woods, and deep ravines. The thought of this bird, always brings to my mind, recollections of pleasant hours, spent in the moist refreshing coolness of the deep woods, where the dense shade is broken only here and there by a ray of sunshine which has penetrated the thick leafy canopy.
Although generally regarded as a shy bird, on several occasions I have found it to apparently lose its accustomed shyness and flit about from branch to branch within fifteen feet of me, very much after the manner of the Wood Pewee.
With one exception. all the nests I have examined were situated in bushes or small trees on the side near the bottom of a ravine. The bird seems to give the preference to iron-wood saplings, for the reason, I suppose, that the tree affords specially favorable branches for the con. struction of nests. Two nests however were found in hickory saplings. One of these was in a tree which had been bent in some way so as to be nearly horizontal in its last ten feet. This nest was nearly 20 feet from the ground. This is the greatest height at which I have found nests of this bird, the usual height being from 4 to 10 feet.
The nesting season begins about the first of June, or possibly a few days earlier, and fresh eggs are to be found from that time until about June 25.
In size and composition the nests are variable, but the general style of architecture remains the same. One of our prominent writers describes the nest as “a light hammock swung between two forks.” The body of the nest is formed principally of dry grass stems and catkins, bound together with spider-webs, and adorned with the ever present pendant grasses. One particularly beautiful nest was composed almost entirely of catkins from the oak tree, and was a model of grace and elegance. Generally, however, the neat appearance of the body of the nest is offset by a trimming of long grasses, giving it the appearance, as some one has said, not of a nest, but of the “remainder of a load of hay.”
The number of eggs in a set is from 2 to 4, but I have always found 3 eggs to constitute a complete set. In size, they are somewhat larger than those of Traill’s Flycatcher, averaging about .73x.53. The ground color is yellowish buff, while the markings are dark brown in color, and generally are distinct in outline, and not blotched as is sometimes the case with the eggs of trailli. A series of eggs of acadicus does not exhibit a very great variation.
Although the Acadian Flycatcher possesses many points in common with other members of Tyrannidæ, it is a bird of marked individuality and is worthy of careful study.
But it is only one among hundreds of others of our birds, and when we remember that the birds form but a small part of the animate creation, and that the animate creation is only a superstructure, based on the great inanimate, we are led to exclaim, O Nature! how deep is thy mystery!
The Acadian Flycatcher in Pottawattamie Co. by Ernest Edwards Irons, Council Bluffs, Iowa. The Iowa Ornithologist, vol 1, 1895.
Summer Resident
This little flycatcher seems to prefer the drier upland woods of some density. It nests in the warmer parts of New York State, chiefly the lower Hudson Valley, and is present in the State from May to September. Wild fruits compose about 3 per cent of the Acadian Flycatcher’s food, spiders, daddy-long-legs, and millipeds a like proportion, while insects contribute the remainder. Hymenoptera form 40 per cent of the whole diet, lepidoptera nearly 20 per cent, beetles about 14 per cent, and flies, bugs, grasshoppers, and crickets the balance. Ants are freely taken, the destructive carpenter ants among them; click beetles, flat-headed and round-headed borers, leaf chafers, the rose beetle (Macrodactylus subspinosus), the locust leaf miner (Odontota dorsalis), other leaf beetles, nut weevils, bark beetles, and tree hoppers are forest parasites consumed. More beneficial than injurious the Acadian or Green-crested Flycatcher is one of the various friends of the forest, which, though usually overlooked, continue steadily working to our good.
Roosevelt Wildlife Bulletin, Vol 4, Number 1, of the Roosevelt Wild Life Forest Experiment Station of The New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University, October 1926
Notwithstanding the suggestive name, the “Acadian” Flycatcher is scarcely a bird of New England, and much misunderstanding has resulted from reliance upon erroneous records of its supposed occurrence in New England. It should be remembered that it is now scarcely more than twenty years since Prof. Baird first accurately distinguished the four eastern species of Empidonax, concerning which the greatest confusion and uncertainty had before obtained. Passing over all the earlier records which, whether having any basis of fact or not, are too indeterminate for use, we may note the steps by which we have reached the true state of the case. In the first general list of New England birds, Dr. Coues speaks of the Acadian Flycatcher in the following terms : “Summer resident. Not abundant. This species seems to be more restricted in its northern range than the others of the genus, apparently not proceeding much farther than Massachusetts. It is not, I believe, recorded from Maine. But Mr. Samuels erroneously omits it from his Massachusetts list. Earlier authors speak of it as being very common, but so far as I can learn it is quite rare. At Washington, D. C., it is by far the most abundant species of the genus.” (Pr. Essex Inst., v, 1868, p. 264).
This is an inkling of the truth, in recognizing the restricted southerly habitat of the bird in comparison with its congeners, and would appear to be well-founded, viewing the many New England records upon which it was based; among them that of so careful and reliable an observer as Mr. Allen, who had confidently attributed the species to Massachusetts (Pr. Essex Inst., iv, 1864, p. 54). The uncertainty of the case was soon after remarked by Dr. Brewer (Am. Nat., i, 1867, p. 119), who later communicated to Dr. Coues a note on the subject, which was published in the Birds of the Northwest. “I do not think the bird occurs in New England, even in the Connecticut Valley, and believe that Mr. Allen has mixed it up with traillii. I have myself no evidence of its breeding northeast of Philadelphia; but it is shy and retiring in its habits, and would readily escape notice, so that its presence in New Jersey, New York, and New England may not be uncommon, and yet we not know it.” (B. N. W., 1874, p. 251.) In the same work (p. 250) it is stated that the bird “remains to be detected in New England.” Dr. Brewer, therefore, very properly expunged the species from his catalogue of 1875, with the following statement: “Mr. Allen informs me that the species found in western Massachusetts, and included by him in the list as the Acadian Flycatcher, is really Emp. Traillii. This leaves us without any evidence of the occurrence of the species, and I have therefore taken it from the list” (Pr. Bost. Soc., xvii, 1875, p. 452).
In 1876, in a paper “on two Empidonaces, traillii and acadicus” (Bull. Nutt. Club, i, 1876, pp. 14-17), the subject was well handled by Mr. Henshaw, with special reference to the differences between the species named in geographical distribution, nesting, and eggs. Then, after it had been made out to every one’s satisfaction that the bird had never been known to occur in New England, the claim of this characteristic component of the Carolinian fauna to a place among the birds of New England was immediately proven by Mr. C. H. Merriam, who marked it in his list as “a rare summer visitant from the middle states,” adding that “it may breed in the Connecticut Valley” as is doubtless the case. “It affords me great pleasure,” he continues, “to be able, through the kindness of Mr. Erwin I. Shores, to replace this species among the birds of New England. As is well known, it was formerly included in [nearly] all New England lists, but, as shown by Dr. Coues, Mr. H. W. Henshaw, and others, the records were founded on erroneous identifications – the bird having been mistaken for E. minimus or Traillii, generally the former. Hence it was with a peculiar sense of gratification that I received, a few days since, an unmistakable example of the species, from Mr. Shores, who relates that he shot it in ‘Suffield, Conn., June 24th, 1874, in a piece of woods known as Beech Swamp.’ For the benefit of those who may not be disposed to accept my identification in so important a matter, and to avoid all possibility of mistake, I at once sent the bird to my friend, Mr. Robert Ridgway, of the Smithsonian Institute, and he pronounces it to be a typical E. acadicus.” (B. Conn., 1877, p. 58.) This species was soon after restored to its rightful place by Dr. Brewer (Pr. Bost. Soc., xix, 1878, p. 306).
Dr. Brewer states that the nest of the Acadian Flycatcher “is generally placed on a drooping limb of a beech or dogwood tree, at a height of from six to ten feet from the ground. It is never saddled on a limb like that of a Wood Pewee, neither is it pensile like that of the Vireos, but is built in the fork of a small limb, and securely fastened thereto by a strip of bark. The nest itself is mostly made of fine strips of bark or weed stalks, woven together without much care as to neatness or strength, and so slight is the structure that you may often count the eggs in the nest from below. Occasionally the bird constructs its nest of the blossoms of the hickory-tree, and when thus made, it is very neat and pretty.” (Hist. N. A. Birds, ii, 1874, p. 376.)
Mr. Henshaw’s article compares the nest with that of E. traillii to find a very striking difference. “It is a slight structure made of fine grasses, interspersed more or less with the blossoms of trees, the whole disposed in a circular form and fitted between two twigs; a firm support is derived from a binding of spiders’ webs, which are interwoven with the sides of the nest, and then carried over the twigs on either side, encircling them with strong bands. The entire base of the nest is without support, and so thin is the slight structure that the eggs might almost be seen from below. It was built in a small tree, perhaps twenty feet from the ground. In this respect the two species vary but little, both preferring to select the lower branches of tree or shrub for their domicile, and only rarely departing from the rule.” (Bull. Nutt. Club, i, 1876, p. 16.)
This account of the decided peculiarity of the nest is endorsed by Dr. Coues, upon examination of specimens sent to him from Missouri. “Two nests of this species are strikingly different from those of trailli in structure, in materials, and in position. They appear to have been taken from long, slender horizontal branchlets, in the horizontal forks of which they rest. They are shallow nests, -in fact, rather saucer-like than cupped-shape, some three and a half inches across outside by less than two inches in depth, the cavity over two inches across the brim, by scarcely one inch in depth. They are very light, ‘open-work’ structures, so thinly floored that the eggs may have been visible to one looking up from below; and the walls, though more compact, still let daylight through on all sides. These nests, in short, may be compared to light hammocks swung between forks. Each is composed almost entirely of long walnut aments, which, drooping in slender sprays from all sides, give a tasteful, airy effect to these pretty structures. There is a slight lining in each case of slender grass-stems and still finer rootlets, loosely interlaid in every direction on the bottom, rather circularly disposed around the brim. These specimens were taken June 13 and 18, 1879, in hickory woods, at altitudes of ten and fifteen feet.” (Bull. Nutt. Club, v, 1880, p. 23.)
According to the same authority the eggs of acadicus are so similar to those of trailli that no one should presume to tell them apart with any show of confidence. They are said to be only three in number. Dr. Coues also gives the following rules for distinguishing the four eastern species of the genus, when site and structure of nests and character of eggs are together taken into consideration:
E. acadicus. Nest in trees, in horizontal forks, thin, saucer-shaped, open-worked; eggs creamy white, boldly spotted.
E. trailli. Nest in trees, in upright crotch, thick, deeply cupped, more or less compact walled; eggs creamy white, boldly spotted.
E. minimus. Nest in trees, in upright crotch, deeply cupped, compact walled; eggs immaculate white.
E. flaviventris. Nest on ground or near it, deeply cupped, thick and bulky; eggs white, spotted.
New England Bird Life: Being A Manual of New England Ornithology, Winfrid A. Stearns. Revised and edited by Elliott Coues. 1883.