Flycatchers and their Classification

While photographing birds is a fun hobby, identifying and categorizing them is a science.  I wish I had paid more attention to the classification of animal life during my mandatory junior high school biology courses.  My interest in birding, and specifically in the flycatcher family, has given me a deep dive into avian taxonomy.

When you start paying attention to birds and their names, you run into new and unfamiliar words like passerines and empids.  I  noticed quickly that these words were being associated with a number of birds that were called flycatchers.  Growing up in the northeast, I was familiar with blue jays, chickadees and robins but not at all with this new species.  When I embraced this new pastime here in Arizona, one of the first birds I shot was a male vermilion flycatcher.   Scarlet like the very familiar cardinal, he's one of prettiest and brightest birds in our desert.  It turns out that he's not only a flycatcher, but he's a passerine, in the order of birds known as passeriformes.

All birds are in the animal class known as aves.  And more than half of all aves are in fact  passeriformes.  These passerines are often collectively referred to as songbirds - which may not be completely accurate, especially when many don't sing.   More accurate is that these very diverse individuals are considered perching birds, having three toes pointing forward and one toe pointing back.  All those familiar backyard birds like orioles, crows, jays, sparrows, robins - the list is endless - are in this order.

The taxonomists break this group into a few sub-orders but many, many more families.  One is the family tyrannidae, more familiarly know as tyrant flycatchers.  They are actually considered the largest family of passerine birds with over 400 species living throughout the Americas.  (Note they are distinct from Old World flycatchers, a completely separate family.)

Why use the word tyrant - a cruel and repressive ruler -  in their name?  It might be because of the eastern kingbird, tyrannus tyrannus, who is fearless in chasing much larger predators from its nest. Incidentally, kingbirds in this family are called by this name because they flash a gold and red crown of feathers in these agressive instances.   Nonetheless, all the small flycatchers we see in Arizona are quite similar in size, shape and behavior. While some of their colors are distinct - note the bright red of the vermilion flycatcher and the jet black of the Say's phoebe - other variations are quite subtle and downright difficult to discern.  They all share the distinct behavior of perching on tree limbs, posts or fences, and making colorful forays to hunt flying insects.  In any case, they don't seem like tyrants.

There may be several dozen species that call Arizona home over the course of a year - a small number out of their total.  Some like the vermilion consider the desert southwest a year-round home, but are much more common throughout Mexico.   Others like the Say's phoebe mostly winter in the desert, spending summer in our mountains.  Finally, some like the Hammond's seem to just migrate through.  But most flycatchers are neo-tropical birds, i.e. more prevalent in Central and South America.  Several of them appear only in our state's very southeastern corner, between Patagonia and Portal.   Overall,  I've only been able to identify nine individual species to date.

I've had the pleasure of photographing a Cordilleran flycatcher in a couple locations across Arizona.   He's considered an empid (short for empidonax), a genus in the family of tyrant flycatchers.  Some of these species are especially difficult to distinguish - markings aren't enough so you need to recognize their calls.  His full scientific name is something like Tyrannidae Empidonax Occidentalis.  This unassuming, diminutive and beautiful creature has a strong and noble name worthy of some notorious and tyrannical, albeit fictitious, Roman Caesar.  Who said classifying birds wasn't fun and sexy?

Male vermilion flycatcher,  pyrocephalus rubinus- the flashy Phoenix neighborhood bird that started my interest in flycatchers. 

Female vermilion flycatcher - Phoenix.

Black phoebe, sayornis nigricans - Scottsdale.

Black phoebe - Phoenix. 

Ash-throated flycatcher, myiarchus cinerascens - Phoenix.

Ash-throated flycatcher - Phoenix.

Western kingbird, tyrannus verticalis - Black Canyon City, Arizona.

Western kingbird - Black Canyon City, Arizona.

Say's phoebe, sayornis saya - Phoenix.

Western wood-pewee, contopus sordidulus - Prescott, Arizona

Western wood-pewee - Prescott, Arizona.

Tropical kingbird, tyrannus melancholicus - Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. 

Gray kingbird, tyrannus dominicensis - Barbados, Lesser Antilles. 

Gray kingbird - Barbados, Lesser Antilles.

Gray kingbird, with a very small hint of his gold and red crown feathers - Saint Thomas, Lesser Antilles.

Cordilleran flycather, empidonax occidentalis - Superior, Arizona. 

 Tyrannidae Empidonax Occidentalis, the noble Cordilleran flycatcher. It's always a relief to get a good shot for identifying a bird - perching, teardrop-shaped white eye-ring, yellow belly, olive back, white wing bars. Still, there are other empids that are close to identical - fortunately not in this specimen's Superior, Arizona neighborhood.  However, another lesson in taxonomy is just a hundred miles away.