Fading fitzbew: in the Southwest, the embattled Willow Flycatcher faces an uphill struggle for survival.

Publication: Birder's World

Publication Date: 01-DEC-97

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COPYRIGHT 1997 Kalmbach Publishing Company

The shrubby willows grow thick along the Little Colorado River in the White Mountains of eastern Arizona, in a valley surrounded by slopes covered with tall ponderosa pines and Douglas-firs. Early on a June morning the air is cool and pleasant. My boots grow soggy from the wet meadow grasses as I walk from one clump of willows to another, stopping at each thicket to listen.

I hear the melodies of Song Sparrows, high twitterings from Violet-green and Barn Swallows, and the insistent calls of Common Yellow-throats. In the distance, a nondescript gray flycatcher alights on a dead willow branch. I strain to hear. "Whit, whit," the bird calls. I slide in the mud at the edge of a beaver pond as I stalk closer. Finally the flycatcher flicks its tail, tilts its head back a trifle, and sings out, "fitz-bew! fitz-bew!"

I am elated. Of all the flycatchers in the genus Empidonax, a look-alike group of small gray birds that are the bane of many birders, the Willow Flycatcher is the only one that sounds like this. This species often sings on migration, but since it's in the middle of the breeding season, this singer must be defending a territory. And that means that Southwestern Willow Flycatchers, among the most recent additions to the federal endangered species list, are nesting here.

Across most of their wide breeding range, Willow Flycatchers are far from rare. They nest throughout most of the United States and southern Canada, except for the Southeast and the...

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