A few hundred miles north and east of Roosevelt Lake is Cottonwood Gulch. It is a very different place. Through old-growth Pinyon-Juniper Woodland (some living trees here date back to the 1600s), flows, in spring, Sawyer Creek, and along it grow cottonwoods and Ponderosa Pines. Today we are focused on the enveloping PJ, as everyone in the Southwest calls it, a vegetation type that covers thousands of square miles in New Mexico and adjacent states. And the most numerous bird in the PJ is the Gray Flycatcher. You could be forgiven for walking through its haunts and not noticing its occasional churrips. But now it is 25 minutes before sunrise, and the Grays are piling it on. Here is the fastest one of the day. Many, perhaps all, species of songbirds sing faster during the predawn minutes. This is when the syntax of Gray Flycatcher singing becomes obvious, for they repeat one song-type several times before uttering the other, and it is never repeated. This is actually a widely used pattern by tyrant flycatchers, the members of the New World family Tyrannidae.
Despite numbering in the millions, the Gray Flycatcher is not very well known by birders, perhaps because they don't bother to go birding in the PJ, or in the Sagebrush Steppe, where this flycatcher also breeds. It actually sounds a bit like a Least Flycatcher, except that the churrips, which resemble the chebecs of the Least, are punctuated with occasional tweeps. The Least Flycatcher doesn't have a sound like that, and besides, wouldn't be caught dead in the PJ. Other western empids that look a lot like the Gray Flycatcher and live nearby have three song-types. The Buff-breasted Flycatcher does use two song-types in similar AAAB fashion, but their breeding range is entirely south of the Gray Flycatcher's. And finally, should you get a look, the Gray Flycatcher famously dips its tail slowly downward, rather than flicking it upward as the other empids do. So, if you live in the western U.S., head out to your local PJ and get to know the Gray Flycatchers. They're waiting for you.