266 LIFE HISTORIES OF NORTH AMERICAN BIRDS. 



g8. Myiarchus cinerascens Lawrence. 



ASH-THROATED FLYCATCHER. 



Tyrannula cinerascens Lawrence, Annals Lyceum of Natural History, New York, V, 



1851, 121. 

 Myiarchus cinerascens Lawrence, Annals Lyceum of Natural History, New York, VII, 



May, 1860, 285. 



(B 131, C 248, R 313, 375, U 454.) 



Geographical range: Western United States; north to southern Oregon, Nevada, 

 Utah, and southern Colorado: east to New Mexico and southwestern Texas; south through 

 Arizona and Lower California, and over the tablelands of Mexico ; in winter to Guatemala, 

 Central America. 



Within the United States the Ash-throated Flycatcher is only a summer 

 resident, and its breeding and geographical range correspond. It returns from 

 its winter haunts in Guatemala and southern Mexico to southwestern Texas and 

 southern Arizona about the beginning of March, and reaches the more northern 

 points of its range about a month later. Climatic conditions do not seem to 

 affect the Ash-throated Flycatcher to any extent, for it is as much at home 

 in the mountain fastnesses of the southern Sierra Nevadas, where Lieutenant 

 Benson found it breeding commonly in the Sequoia National Park, in Tulare 

 Comity, California, at an altitude of 9,000 feet, as in Death Valley, probably 

 the hottest place in the United States, where a pair of these birds were seen at 

 Furnace Creek, on June 21, 1891, by Dr. A. K. Fisher. It is fairly common 

 at Redding and Baird, in Shasta County, and at Red Bluff, Tehama County, 

 California, and reaches about the northern limits of its breeding range in 

 southern Oregon, where it is rare. I found a single nest of this species contain- 

 ing five young birds about ten days old, in a natural cavity in a juniper tree 

 near Camp Harney, Oregon, on June 20, 1876, but they appear to be very rare 

 there, as no others were noticed. 



The Ash-throated Flycatcher is rather retiring in its habits, and is oftener 

 heard than seen. In the vicinity of Tucson, Arizona, in the season of 1872, I 

 found it quite common and examined a number of nests. Their favorite haunts 

 were the denser mesquite thickets in the creek bottoms, oak groves along hill- 

 sides, and the shrubbery in canyons leading down from the mountains, but I 

 also saw them occasionally on the more open plains covered with straggling 

 mesquite trees and patches of cholla and other species of cacti. It is not nearly 

 as noisy a bird as Myiarchus crinitus, but otherwise resembles it in its general 

 habits. Its principal call note is a clear "huit, huit," a number of times 

 repeated, which sounds very much like the ordinary call of the Phainopepla ; it 

 also utters some low, whistling notes which are not at all disagreeable to the ear. 

 In the spring of 1872 it became abundant about the latter half of March, and 

 several of these birds might be seen chasing each other through the mesquite 

 forests in almost every direction, within a few hundred yards of my camp on 

 Rillito Creek, but nidification did not appear to begin till near the end of May. 



