Western Wood-Pewee

About the Western Wood-Pewee

The Western Wood-Pewee is a plain gray-brown flycatcher with two dull wing bars, a peaked crown, and no eye-ring. It is nearly identical to the Eastern Wood-Pewee by sight; the reliable difference is voice - a burry, descending "peeer" instead of the Eastern's sweet whistled song.

Pewees hunt from high, exposed dead branches, launching out after flying insects and often returning to the exact same perch. The nest is a shallow cup of grass and plant fibers bound with spider silk, saddled on a horizontal limb and camouflaged to look like a bump of lichen.

In Texas the Western Wood-Pewee breeds in the mountains and river woodlands of the Trans-Pecos and passes through the western half of the state in spring and fall migration.