Lord of the flies

Scissor-tailed flycatchers rank among the most elegant and easily recognizable songbirds in Arkansas and all of North America.

With extremely long tails and peachy-rose breast color that peeks out from beneath slate-colored wings, they are easy to spot and identify.

They perch openly on power lines, barbed wire fences and leafless tree limbs, and they are much more comfortable around humans than many of their feathered relatives. They can be seen on golf courses, at airports and in cemeteries.

Arkansas has other birds in the flycatcher family, but the scissortail is the emperor of all the others for its size, abundance and distinctive good looks.

Scissor-tailed flycatchers (Tyrannus forficatus) are plentiful in the western tier of Arkansas counties and are commonly seen in other parts of the state, especially on open pastures and cattle ranches. They like scrubby areas with scattered trees and water nearby. They aren't so common where row crops or thick forests dominate the landscape.

Cornell University's Laboratory of Ornithology rates the bird's conservation status as "least concern," and it is abundant within its range.

According to the Peterson Field Guide to Birds of Eastern and Central North America, the natural summer range blankets Texas and extends up through all of Oklahoma (where the scissor-tailed flycatcher is the state bird) and into southern Kansas. It also includes southwestern Missouri, western Arkansas and western Louisiana.

But researchers say the species' range seems to be shifting toward the north and east, as are the ranges of several other kinds of birds.

During migration, a single scissortail may wander far from the typical migratory path into Central America, followed by the others in its tribe. Scissortails have been reported as rare "accidentals" in British Columbia and Nova Scotia.

These birds prefer open fields of grass and weeds where they can pose motionless on a snag or wire before swooping down on a hapless insect.

Their last name is "flycatcher," but they feed on grasshoppers, beetles and moths as well as flies. Hall of Famer Willie Mays caught 448 fly balls in his best year as a major league outfielder; a scissortail might catch that many flies in a week.

Insects provide most of their diet, although observers have noted that they also eat mulberries, hackberries and perhaps other fruit.

TALL TAIL

An adult male flycatcher can grow to 15 inches long. Only 6 inches are the body of the bird, the other 9 are all tail feathers.

The long tail allows the bird to make acrobatic maneuvers in midair. It can pause momentarily like a helicopter while it snags prey midflight.

It opens and closes its primary tail feathers in a scissor-like motion during aerial courtship displays and occasionally while feeding. This behavior gave the bird its apt descriptive name: scissor-tailed. (It has also been called the "swallow-tailed flycatcher" and the "Texas bird-of-paradise.")

The male and the female adults have long tails. A juvenile's tail feathers are noticeably longer than a similarly sized mockingbird, but noticeably shorter than the adult scissortails.

Writing in The Auk in 2001, ornithologists J.V. Regosin and S. Pruett-Jones reported that tail length, wing span and beak length were all factors in distinguishing sexual potency among scissor-tailed flycatchers, but that the length of the male's tail was the factor most closely associated with "early clutch initiation" and clutch size.

This means that the longer the adult flycatcher's tail is, the earlier the eggs of its mate will be laid and the greater the number of eggs in a nest.

The female builds the cup-shaped nest alone, usually in a tree, 7 to 25 feet above the ground. The nests are occasionally built on structures like towers, bridge girders, or utility poles. I once saw one nesting on the runway lights at the Hot Springs Memorial Field Airport. The nest can be made of stems, grasses, cotton fiber, feathers or human trash such as paper, carpet fuzz, cigarette filters or string.

She incubates four to seven creamy white eggs for 13 to 16 days. After the eggs hatch, the male parent assists in feeding the nestlings.

The young take flight from their home about two weeks after they hatch.

HANGING OUT

Scissor-tailed flycatchers will be seen alone or in pairs during summer nesting seasons. It is not unusual to see them in the company of other birds in the flycatcher family.

Occasionally, four or five fledglings from the same nest will hang together for a few days until they gain confidence in their own independence. As migration time approaches, they gather into large flocks for the trip to southern Mexico and the Pacific coast of Central America, where they winter.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology reported that some of these pre-migratory flocks may number as many as a thousand birds. I once observed a group of about a hundred scissortails in late September as they gathered on utility wires near one of Lonoke's public schools. They remained as a group in that general area for about a week before moving south.

Those flycatchers seemed to be unaffected by the noisy children on the playground and honking traffic nearby.

Scissortails arrive in Arkansas in March and begin leaving in September but are not all gone until early November.

EYE-CATCHER

Birding Pals is a worldwide network of people who enjoy birds. They are linked together through the internet and assist people from different areas who want to see birds they may not usually have occasion to see.

For more than 10 years, I have been an Arkansas "Birding Pal." During those years I have hosted about 40 people visiting the state, most of them from the East Coast; some I've hosted as a personal birding guide and others over the phone by helping them find birding areas.

When I ask them, "What bird would you most like to see?" they almost always mention the scissor-tailed flycatcher.

When they see it, they are never disappointed.

Jerry Butler writes about Arkansas birds and people who enjoy them. He welcomes comments at

jerrysharon.butler@gmail.com

ActiveStyle on 09/26/2016