204 BULLETIN 17 9, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



EMPIDONAX TRAILLI TRAILLI (Audubon) 

 ALDER FLYCATCHER 



Plates 25, 26 



HABITS 



This is the Traill's flycatcher of the older Check-lists and the 

 bird that Audubon named for his friend Dr. Thomas S. Traill, of 

 Edinburgh, and which he supposed represented a single species with 

 a distribution extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Since the 

 species has been subdivided, so much confusion has existed in the 

 use of both scientific and common names for the two forms, as well 

 as differences of opinion as to their distribution, that it seems best 

 to abandon the common name Traill's flycatcher, revert to the old 

 name little flycatcher for the western form, and use the above name 

 for the eastern race; so, now we have a combination of Audubon's 

 scientific name for the species and Brewster's (1895) proposed com- 

 mon name for the eastern subspecies. Some idea of the confusion 

 that existed at the time that Brewster proposed the name alder fly- 

 catcher for the eastern race can be gained by reading his paper 

 (1895), Both he and Eidgway (1907) regarded the birds of the 

 Mississippi Valley region, or at least the southern part of it, as 

 referable to the western race; and the 1910 A. O. U. Check-list con- 

 curred in this view; but the 1931 Check-list refers these birds to 

 the eastern race. I do not feel competent to argue the case, but I 

 have noticed that the nests and nesting sites of the birds breeding 

 in the Mississippi Valley and adjacent States are quite different from 

 those found east of the Allegheny Mountains and farther north and 

 are much like those found west of the Rocky Mountains. Dr. Ober- 

 holser tells me that before he applied the name hrewsteii to the 

 western race he had studied a large series of these flycatchers from 

 all over their range in North America and that there cannot be the 

 slightest doubt that the Mississippi Valley birds belong to the 

 eastern race. 



The haunts of the alder flycatcher are not very different from 

 those of its western relative. In the eastern and northern portions 

 of its range, it makes its summer home in dense, low, and usually 

 damp thickets of alders, willows, elderberries, sumacs, red osier 

 dogwood, and viburnums, along the banks of some small stream, 

 around the shores of a pond, or on the borders of a marsh or bog; 

 but sometimes in the Middle West it is found breeding under suitable 

 conditions at some distance from any water. John A. Farley 

 (1901a), who has made a special study of this flycatcher, writes: 



The Alder Flycatcher arrives In eastern Massachusetts about May 20. By 

 the thirtieth of the month it has always reappeared on its breeding grounds. 



