Great Crested Flycatcher
Myiarchus crinitus · Flycatchers
Great Crested Flycatcher
Staten Island, 5 July 2026
A Great Crested Flycatcher at eye level on Staten Island, which is worth having, since this is a bird of the treetops, more often heard than seen: a loud, rising "wheep" from the canopy of the eastern woods, where it spends the summer sallying out for insects. Not the wren it was first written up as.
Grey breast, lemon-yellow belly, a rusty wash in the wings and tail, and the crest that names the species, here only half raised. One of the few flycatchers that nests in holes, and it lines the cavity with, among other things, a shed snakeskin.
Great Crested Flycatcher
Central Park, 21 September 2025
A Great Crested Flycatcher in Central Park in September with a cicada or a large moth gripped crosswise in the bill. It is a flycatcher of the treetops of the eastern woods, more often heard than seen, and in September it is passing through on its way to Central America.
Flycatchers hunt by sallying out from a perch after a single target rather than gleaning steadily like a warbler, and this one has just connected. Great Cresteds are the only eastern flycatcher that nests in a hole, and they line it, for reasons nobody has settled, with a shed snakeskin.
Birds, insects, plants and other wildlife, mostly from Brooklyn, with some from further afield.
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