On Christmas, 1974, my husband’s parents gave me my first
field guide and binoculars—the best Christmas present I ever got. Between
Christmas and the following March, I pored over the Peterson guide and then the
Golden Guide, trying to memorize all the possibilities before I set out to be a
birder. As I went page by page through the Golden Guide, I saw in the middle an
elegant little bird, slate gray all over except for a white belly and white on
the outer tail feathers. I thought I’d be able to keep that one straight, but
then close to the end of the book I discovered another bird with the same
description. The bird in the back was the Slate-colored Junco, now called the
Dark-eyed Junco. The one in the middle was the Black Phoebe. Seeing two entirely unrelated birds with such
similar markings was sobering—identifying birds was going to be a lot harder
than I’d thought.
I saw lots of juncos that first year but stayed well out of
the range of the Black Phoebe for over seven years—they live in coastal
California and along the US side of the Mexican border all the way down into
northern South America. I didn’t need to worry about confusing Black Phoebes
and juncos because I quickly got a good sense of what juncos were like and could
identify them by shape and behavior within days of seeing my first one. By the
time I saw my first Black Phoebe in Las Vegas in 1982, I was so familiar with
Eastern Phoebes that the similarities were too strong to miss, and the color
pattern similarity with juncos turned out to be completely unimportant.
Like Eastern Phoebes, Black Phoebes sit fairly erect and
persistently wag their tails. They flutter out to catch flying insects and
return to the same perch or fly to another nearby perch, often close to the
ground. They virtually never walk, hop,
or even shift position, moving about almost exclusively on the wing. Every one
I’ve ever seen has been close to water, from running streams in Costa Rica to
sewage treatment ponds and ocean shoreline in California. They’ve allowed very
close approach, but their facial plumage is so blackish that even at close
range, I need good light to distinguish the eyes from the surrounding plumage.
Last week Russ and I spent a few days in southern California. He spent the days
at meetings while I was walking about birding. I came upon several Black
Phoebes, and as is usually the case, some of them were extremely cooperative,
so I did get a few nice photos.
Black Phoebes require not just water but good supplies of
mud for building their nests onto a secure substrate, so pairs tend to be
protective of their nesting areas. Perhaps because of this nest site fidelity,
pairs tend to nest together year after year, usually beginning to nest weeks
earlier than new pairs, probably both because they don’t need to establish a
pair bond and because they already have identified a good nesting site. In
winter, they’re fairly solitary. It’s tough eeking out an existence fueled on
flying insects when predators lurk everywhere. But Black Phoebes do it with grace
and style. Every moment I’ve ever spent in the company of a Black Phoebe has
been a moment well spent.
