Contopus virens
Order Passeriformes
Family Tyrannidae
Subfamily Fluvicolinae
Adult.— Upper parts dark brownish-gray; two white wing-bars; under parts whitish, the sides washed with dark gray.
Nest, flattish, saddled on a limb, twenty to forty feet up, exquisitely decorated with a green lichen.
Eggs, white, with a ring of dark markings about the larger end.
The Wood Pewee is a rather common summer resident of New York and New England. It arrives in May, and leaves toward the end of September. It is a characteristic bird of open woodland groves or the tall shade-trees of village streets and plantations. It sits on the ends of dead limbs, usually in the shade of the upper branches, and darts out at passing insects, returning, after its sally, to the same perch or to a neighboring limb. The ordinary drawled peea-wee pee-a is to be distinguished, on the one hand, from the pure phee-bee of the Chickadee and the rather hoarse phee’-wă of the Phæbe. Toward the middle of August the full song is rarely heard, and the common note is a shorter pee’-a, which must not be confused in northern New England with the call-note of the Yellow-bellied Flycatcher. The bird utters beside a low chit, and about the nest an excited chitter.
The long-drawn song, when given, distinguishes the Wood Pewee from any of the other Flycatchers, but when the bird is silent it may be confused either with the Phæbe or with the Chebec. It may be distinguished from the former by its smaller size and by its well-marked wing-bars; moreover, it never flirts its tail after the manner of the Phoebe. It is considerably larger than the Chebec, and, when it faces an observer, the middle of its breast shows a light line separating the darker sides.
Hoffmann – A Guide to the Birds of New England and Eastern New York (1904)