by Frank Keim
The Say’s phoebe is one of the friendliest birds I’ve ever met, especially when mosquitoes are buzzing around your face. With their gentle facial expression, they show no fear as they hover around your eyes and nose snatching as many of the pesky insects as they can. They breed farther north than any other flycatcher, and while hiking in the Alaskan outback, even on the north flank of the Brooks Range, they have been my welcome constant companions.
I have encountered them especially in steep rocky places composed of limestone where there are many cracks and crevices with cavities that serve as their preferred nest sites. While living and teaching for 21 years on the Y-K Delta, I never did see one of these birds, probably because they are found just east and north of the village of Marshall in more open areas between the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers. This may be the reason I have never tracked down a Yup’ik name for them. With the warming climate, they are probably also a recent arrival to that region in Alaska.
After wintering as far as southern Mexico, the males are the first to arrive back in Alaska in early May just as the insect populations begin to multiply there. As a member of the flycatcher family, their diet consists almost entirely of flies, moths, bees, wasps, dragonflies, grasshoppers, beetles and other insects. They mostly catch them while sallying forth from low perches to snag them in midair, but they also may pounce on them on the ground.
After selecting his territory, the male sings to protect it on an exposed ledge of rock or branch of a tree, or during a flight song display, which also serves to attract a mate. Once the female makes her choice and the pair bond has been sealed, the male escorts the female around to potential nest sites.
Each time, he flutters his wings and chatters to the female until she selects just the right spot. The location of the nest varies, although she prefers a cavity somewhere in a rocky crevice, cave, steep bank or tree trunk. Often the nest site is the same one the pair had used during previous years. Once, in mid-June, while checking out a Say’s phoebe nest on a ledge in a shallow cave near the Marsh Fork of the Canning River in the Brooks Range, I counted four successive cup-shaped nests one on top of another of a pair that was nesting there.
The female alone builds the nest out of grass, moss, spider webs, wool, feathers, and various vegetable materials. If she reuses an old nest, she adds a fresh new lining of down feathers and hair to it, then lays 4-6 white eggs, and incubates them by herself for 12-18 days. Both parents bring food for the nestlings until they leave the nest two to three weeks later. During this period, they watch their parents closely as they hunt insects to learn the many species they catch and the strategies they use to catch them.
Say’s phoebes have been in North America for a long time. Paleontologists discovered fossils from the species in Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas dating back to about 400,000 years ago.
Charles Bonaparte, a nephew of Napoleon, named the flycatcher after American naturalist Thomas Say, the first scientist to encounter the bird near Cañon City, Colorado, in 1819.
The bird’s scientific name, Sayornis saya, literally means “Say’s bird,” from the Greek “ornis,” bird, and the proper name, Say.
As of now, Say’s phoebes don’t seem to have been affected by climate change, but since this inevitable phenomenon becomes more and more of a reality in Alaska and the world, it is probable that we will see some changes in the bird’s habitats, including the availability of insects, in the not too distant future, and the resulting cascade of consequences for the species far into the future.
