TAIGA FLYCATCHER Ficedula albicilla (Pallas, 1811)

This small flycatcher and its former conspecific, the Red-breasted Flycatcher (F. parva), breed in forests and woodlands in a band that spans most of northern Eurasia. Morphological, vocal, and distributional differences between these taxa were treated by Cederroth et al. (1999) and Svensson et al. (2005). Taiga Fly­catchers breed from the Ural Mts. east to eastern Siberia, Kam­chat­ka, and the Sea of Okhotsk. Their wintering grounds extend from west-central India east to the upper Malay Peninsula. In Europe, vagrants have been recorded in Sweden, Denmark, and Great Britain. The species is a casual spring migrant to the western Aleutian Islands and has been recorded twice at Gambell, St. Lawrence Island, where a bird on 19 September 2005 (NAB 59:131) furnished the first record of a fall vagrant in the New World.

The first Taiga Flycatcher to be found on the North American mainland, and the continent’s second fall vagrant, was photographed on 25 October 2006 at Putah Creek on the border of Solano and Yolo Counties (Figures H-31, H-32). The bird could not be refound the following day.