Empidonax minimus
Order Passeriformes
Family Tyrannidae
Subfamily Fluvicolinae
Other names: Chebec
Adult.— Upper parts olive-green, tinged with brownish; wingbars ash-white; under parts whitish, with a slight tinge of yellow on the belly.
Nest, a neat gray cup, often in a crotch from twenty to thirty feet up.
Eggs, white.
The Chebec, is very common throughout New York and New England, except in the less cultivated districts of northern New England and New York, where it is chiefly confined to the villages and the neighborhood of tilled fields, its place being taken in the wilder regions by the Alder Flycatcher. It arrives late in April, and in eastern Massachusetts is rarely seen after the end of August. It breeds in apple orchards, edges of woodland, in fact, wherever trees are separated by slight open spaces in which it can hunt. It sits on some fairly exposed perch, in the manner characteristic of flycatchers, and makes constant sallies into the air, down over the grass, or even against the trunks of trees.
The male in spring and early summer is a constant singer, snapping out the syllables se-bic’, with a violent jerk of his head and a quiver of the tail. Both sexes, after alighting, often utter a little gurgling note, and quiver wings and tail. The call-note is whit. Just before dusk the male often flies up from some tree near the nest, and delivers a flight-song, in which the call-note, whit, and the ordinary song, se-bic’, are repeated many times.
Hoffmann – A Guide to the Birds of New England and Eastern New York (1904)