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Eastern wood pewee has two crisp, pale wing bars and long primary projection. Western wood pewee looks like its sister species. Eastern phoebe lacks bolder wing bars and has shorter primary projection. Least flycatcher has bold eye-rings and shorter primary projection.

Nov 3, 2022 · Pewees are small gray birds that prefer coniferous forests or deciduous forests. The Eastern and Western pewee is the most common subspecies in the United States. Although they reside on different coastlines, they look almost identical. Pewees are gray birds with black wing bars and dark black eyes.

In eastern woods in summer, the plaintive whistled pee-a-wee of this small flycatcher is often heard before the bird is seen. The bird itself is usually somewhere in the leafy middle story of the trees, perched on a bare twig, darting out to catch passing insects.

The olive-brown Eastern Wood-Pewee is inconspicuous until it opens its bill and gives its unmistakable slurred call: pee-a-wee! —a characteristic sound of Eastern summers. These small flycatchers perch on dead branches in the mid-canopy and sally out after flying insects.

Usually found in clearings and forest edges, Eastern Wood-Pewees breed in nearly any type of wooded habitat in the eastern United States and southeastern Canada—including mature woodlands, urban shade trees, roadsides, woodlots, and orchards.

In a forest where several flycatcher species are found, the Eastern Wood-Pewee forages higher in the trees than the Least and Acadian Flycatchers, but lower down than the Great Crested Flycatcher. One potential cause of the decline of Eastern Wood-Pewee populations is the overpopulation of white-tailed deer in the Eastern forests.

Learn how to spot an eastern wood pewee in the wild.

It is in the darkest and most gloomy retreats of the forest that the Wood Pewee is generally to be found, during the season which it spends with us.

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