Figure 339. Owing to the challenge of identifying silent individuals in the field, the CBRC has accepted only ten Eastern Wood-Pewees. This vocal, first-fall bird—photographed on 1 November 1996 in Huntington Beach, Orange County—was the latest ever recorded in the state. The uniformly pale lower mandible would be atypical for a Western Wood-Pewee, and tapered rectrices indicate the bird’s age (1996-155; Brian E. Small).

 

 

 

 

 

 

EASTERN WOOD-PEWEE Contopus virens (Linnaeus, 1766)

Accepted: 10 (40%)	Treated in Appendix H: yes
Not accepted: 15	CBRC review: all records
Not submitted/reviewed: 0	Color image: none

This flycatcher breeds from southeastern Saskatchewan east to Nova Scotia in the north, down through the eastern Great Plains, and from central Texas east to northern Florida in the south. The wintering grounds are in northern South America, with scattered winter records north to Costa Rica. Most birds migrate through eastern Mexico, and the species is causal through the West Indies. Vagrants have been recorded across the West, as far north as Oregon and Montana, and have been found far offshore on Clipperton Atoll and in the northern Atlantic Ocean 200 miles off Labrador.

California’s first Eastern Wood-Pewee was captured on 15 June 1975 at Southeast Farallon Island (DeSante and Ainley 1980). In most cases a bird in the hand can be confidently identified, but only with care and mainly by measurements (Pyle 1997a, 1997b; Hubbard 2002). Free-flying individuals are notoriously tricky to identify unless they are giving diagnostic vocalizations (see Rising and Schueler 1980, Dunn and Garrett 1983, Pyle and McCaskie 1992). Western Wood-Pewees sometimes offer clear whistled notes, and this is but one of the pitfalls facing observers attempting to distinguish one wood-pewee from another. Were their identification more straightforward, Easterns would surely be recorded in California more frequently than they have been to date. A spring vagrant found on 10 June 1998 at Galileo Hill in Kern County, which uttered mainly persistent chip notes, was morphologically typical of an Eastern Wood-Pewee. All the other accepted records involve either birds measured in the hand or individuals with indicative plumage and bare-part coloration that were heard giving diagnostic songs and/or whistled ascending calls.

With the exception of a first-fall Eastern Wood-Pewee present from 31 October to 6 November 1996 in Huntington Beach, Orange County (Figure 339), California records pertain exclusively to late-spring and summer vagrants (3 June–17 September, the latest involving a singing bird first noted in mid August). Five of California’s ten accepted records occurred during a five-week span (3 June–9 July 1998), and this same period yielded additional records from southern Arizona (Rosenberg and Witzeman 1999). See also Appendix H.