Eastern Wood-Pewee

About the Eastern Wood-Pewee

The Eastern Wood-Pewee is the definition of an honest, hard-working flycatcher - a small, gray-olive bird with smudgy sides, two pale wing bars, and no eye-ring, best identified by voice: the sweet, slurred, unhurried "pee-a-WEE... pee-YER" that drifts from open woods all summer, often when nothing else is singing in the midday heat.

Pewees hunt from an exposed dead branch in the mid-canopy, sitting bolt upright and sallying out in long, graceful loops after flying insects, usually returning to the very same perch. Unlike the closely related Empidonax flycatchers they rarely flick their wings or tail - a calm bird among fidgety cousins.

In Texas the Eastern Wood-Pewee is a summer breeder in the wooded eastern half of the state, west to the oak country of Central Texas, and a common migrant statewide in spring and fall. Its near-twin the Western Wood-Pewee replaces it in the Trans-Pecos - voice is the reliable way to tell them apart.