Say's Phoebe

About the Say's Phoebe

The Say's Phoebe is the desert's gentle flycatcher - soft gray-brown above with a warm cinnamon belly, a black tail, and none of the sharp contrast of its eastern cousin. It has the classic phoebe habits: a perpetually wagging tail, low open perches, and a comfortable tolerance of people and their buildings.

It hunts from fence lines, low shrubs, and wires, sallying after flying insects or hovering low over open ground like a tiny kestrel before dropping on grasshoppers and beetles - a hovering habit few other flycatchers share. The call is a soft, plaintive, down-slurred "pee-ur" that fits the open country it lives in.

Say's Phoebes are famously attached to structures, nesting on ledges under eaves, in wells, barns, and abandoned buildings across the West; the species' breeding range runs astonishingly far north, to the edge of the Alaskan Arctic - farther north than any other flycatcher in the world.

In Texas it is a bird of the western half: a year-round resident in the Trans-Pecos and Panhandle and a winter visitor spreading east across the Hill Country and brush country, where single birds take up winter territories on open ranchland, returning to the same fence corners day after day.