Bird #230 — Alder Flycatcher

empidonax (from empidos, mosquito, and anax, king) alnorum (alders)

Sunday, May 30, 1982 — 11:00 am

Three Lakes, Wisconsin — off C.T.H. A, near town

The book, Wisconsin’s Favorite Bird Haunts, sent me to this place to look for Boreal Chickadees.  The location consists of a massive, wet black spruce bog.  A track leads back from the highway though the bog with a thick stand of spruce on one side and an open boggy area with scattered spruce on the other.  I hiked all the way through this area without seeing much, then entered a wetter area covered with brush about five feet high.

I heard the Alder Flycatcher from quite a ways away and knew what it was, but I had difficulty finding it because the brush was so high, thick and close the road.  I finally spotted it perched in a small tree.  It flitted away to the top of a bush, then down out of sight into the brush. Its song was a burry, three-syllable “fee-bee-o” accented on the last syllable and repeated every 10 to 15 seconds.

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