My first Scissor-tailed Flycatcher sighting occurred several
years ago while I was waiting at a bus stop in Fayetteville, Arkansas. I’ve seen these birds countless times since
then, and even noticed some recently fledged young from time to time. That was in Arkansas, though. The species is rare where I now live; any
Scissor-tails that show up east of the Mississippi River tend to garner a lot
of attention from birders. So when a
pair of Scissor-tails nested in a rural part of Lowndes County, MS, south of
Artesia, back in spring/summer 2015, I was thrilled.
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| Scissor-tailed Flycatcher in Lowndes County, Mississippi |
I went out to the area with a couple of my family members,
hoping to see the birds and their nest. It
wasn’t too difficult to spot the adults.
With their gorgeous streamer-like tails, loud calls, and exuberant foraging
behavior of sallying out to catch flying insects, Scissor-tails are the polar opposite
of inconspicuous. And their habitat,
wide open fields with a few trees and shrubs, doesn’t provide much in the way
of concealment. That said, I suppose
that trying to find this species in Mississippi really can be a bit like
looking for a needle in a haystack, given how many farms and fields there are
to search.
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| One of the Lowndes County Scissor-tails |
The birds had built a nest very high up—probably a good
80-85 feet—on a cell tower. The species typically
builds nests at much lower levels than this; a study in Texas (Nolte and Fulbright 1996) showed that the average nest height
was a little over 9 feet, or 2.8 meters.
The highest nests found during field research in Texas in the late 1940s
were built 26 ft., 10 in. up on the cross-arm of a telephone pole (Fitch
1950). The author, Frank Williams Fitch,
Jr., referred to these telephone pole nests as “unusual.” I wonder what he would have made of the cell
phone tower nest near Artesia! To be
fair, I doubt that many mid-20th-century field ornithologists had any
inkling of how drastically the landscape would change as a result of
technology.
Maybe the Lowndes County flycatchers simply felt more secure
at the tower than they would have if they had nested in a shrub. Aerial predators wouldn’t have had any
trouble accessing the nest, of course, but I expect that the height would have
deterred most other potential nest raiders.
The nest is in the center of the photo below. You can just barely make out the grasses, stems,
and roots hanging down from the metal bar.
Scissor-tailed Flycatchers lay 3-6 eggs, but I knew that I
wasn’t going to be able to see any eggs from the ground! Nest cameras certainly would’ve been helpful
here.
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| Can't really see anything... |
The December 2016 issue of The Mississippi Kite contains a
mention of these nesting Scissor-tails (Vol. 46, No. 2, p. 19). It says that they were observed from April 22
to July 17. This would have given them
ample time to build the nest (a process that takes a few days), deposit the
eggs (females lay one a day), incubate their eggs (which the females usually take about 14
days to do) and raise the nestlings (a task for both parents that averages 15.4 days). Sometimes Scissor-tailed Flycatchers take up
to four weeks’ time between nest-building and egg-laying. I can only assume that there must be some
benefit (or at least no drawback) to taking things easy, or surely the birds wouldn’t
do it. On the other hand, maybe Scissor-tails
are using most of this “extra” time to defend and secure their territory, and
aren’t being lazy at all. It’s worth
considering, right?
To conclude, here are some better-quality pictures of
Scissor-tails that I took at a couple of different locations in Arkansas:
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| May 29, 2014 |
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| June 13, 2015 |
References:
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