tyrannus couchii
Clark County, Arkansas – Alcoa Bottoms – Hasley Road
Tuesday, April 25, 2023 – 7:55 am
This bird was discovered near Arkadelphia last week but not entered on eBird until yesterday. I was birding in Little Rock when the email came through yesterday. It would have taken me less than an hour to dash down and see it in the beautiful afternoon weather. But like a moron, I mistook Arkadelphia for Texarkana, which is considerably further away, and I mistook Couch’s Kingbird for Cassin’s Kingbird, which I’ve seen several times in Arizona and Colorado. So I didn’t go. It wasn’t until I got home and my brain kicked in that I realized Couch’s would be a lifer — and one that was fairly easy to get to.
I got up at 5:30 on Tuesday and headed south in the dark. It was an overcast day with rain in the forecast. I arrived at the reported location around 7:45. If this had been Illinois or Colorado, there would have been a clump of birders there already, either looking at the kingbird or looking for it. But this is Arkansas, and there was nobody around.
The reports said the bird was seen north of the bridge on Hasley Road, but the coordinates that were given were south of the bridge. (I later realized there were two bridges and the bird was located between them.) I started walking the wrong way, but soon decided to trust the coordinates and turned around. I spotted the bird almost immediately. It was about 80 yards away, perched on a roadside wire next to a dense thicket of small trees. (You can see the bird as a dot in the upper left of the photo, although when I first saw it, it was down further, close to the pole.)
It was so gloomy that the bird was just a silhouette against the sky. I could see that it had the basic shape of a kingbird and that its belly was yellow, but that’s all. Before I could get any closer, it flew off over the trees. I walked slowly down the road in that direction. After perhaps five minutes, I heard four or five sharp “cheeps” from the thicket. A few seconds later, the kingbird flew out of the thicket at about head height and landed on the wire (where it is in the photo above). It had a large insect in its bill. It proceeded to beat the insect repeatedly against the wire, until, I imagine, it was dead. The bird then spent about a minute positioning the insect for swallowing, including throwing it up in the air and catching it a couple times.
After the meal was over, the kingbird stayed in the same spot for another couple minutes. It was looking about alertly as though searching for more insects. I took a few steps closer, and it flew off and landed in a snag at the top of a tree on the other side of the road.
I later realized I’d had my camera on the wrong setting, which is why (coupled with the gray conditions) the pictures are so bad. By the time I figured this out, it was raining too hard to get better shots.
The bird flew off to the south, and I walked back and forth along the road to see what else there was to see. A road grader came along, and the driver stopped and asked me “Have you seen it today?” I established that he was talking about the kingbird and told him I had. I answered some questions about it and told him where it’s normal range is. He said “The world is changing,” and proceeded to explain that the bird was here because of global warming. I didn’t bother arguing with him.
It began raining, so I returned to my car and drove further down the road. When I drove back through the same stretch, the kingbird was back on the wire, south of the pole this time. It was raining hard and I couldn’t see anything but a shape. As I passed, it flew off over the thicket, and I headed for home.
The Couch’s Kingbird is native to Mexico. It summers in south Texas, but is rare this far north. So far as I can tell from eBird, this is only the second one ever found in the state. It looks almost identical to the Tropical Kingbird (which I saw near Pine Bluff — also a rarity — in December, 2020, and down in Arizona in 2022), but the calls of the two birds are very different. I heard the Couch’s call four or five times in the thicket before it emerged with the insect, so I don’t have to rely on the testimony of others for confirmation.