Yellow-bellied Flycatcher

About the Yellow-bellied Flycatcher

Among the maddening look-alike Empidonax flycatchers, the Yellow-bellied is the one that actually gives you a field mark you can see: a wash of true yellow across the throat and belly, paired with a complete yellowish eye-ring and an olive-green back. In a family of gray-on-gray puzzles, a little color goes a long way.

This is a bird of the great northern bogs - it breeds in mossy spruce forest and muskeg across Canada - and Texas sees it only in passage, mostly in May and again in early fall, when it travels between that boreal world and wintering grounds in Mexico and Central America.

Migrants keep to the shade. Look for a small, compact flycatcher sitting low and quiet inside a thicket or woodland understory, making short sallies for insects and returning to a hidden perch, rarely showing itself in the open the way kingbirds and phoebes do.

Its call is a soft, liquid "chu-wee" with an upward inflection - gentler than the snappy calls of its relatives, and often the first clue that this quiet passerby in the shadows is the Empidonax with the yellow belly.