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.