One of the common flycatchers in Virginia’s summer woodlands is the eastern wood pewee. This is another of those birds we are more apt to hear than see. Unless you’re tuned in to it, you may not notice it, but it is a common sound all summer long. The call is simply  “pee-u-wee-ee-e” or  “pee-u-wee” repeated, then followed by a descending “du-wee." It sings its name! And you can hear it echo through the woods. Come fall, they become silent.

     It moves about quietly when feeding, and may suddenly appear as if out of nowhere, usually sitting on a dead branch –like a lower limb of a pine--about mid-level in the forest. This is where it gets the nickname “dead limb bird.”

     Pewees tend to inhabit the mature, dense, mixed forests especially near water like its cousin the phoebe, but they will be found in clearings or in orchards as well. Its diet is probably 99% insects, which it catches in typical fly up, flycatcher fashion.

     Color-wise it’s a plain dark-olive or grayish-olive above, with its head being a bit darker and more brownish. It’s under parts are yellowish-white with an olive-gray wash on its breast, and it shows whitish wing bars, which the phoebe doesn’t have. It is similar to another common woodlands flycatcher, the eastern phoebe, but doesn’t have a distinct eye ring and it doesn’t wag or jerk its tail.

     Pewees build a nest of grasses; bark strips, mosses, decorated with lichens and lined with fine grasses and animal hair. Two or three cream-colored eggs with dark brownish markings around the large end are laid.
Pewees will be with us until about late-September and young-of-the-year pewees will sometimes migrate with fall warblers as they head for Central and South America.

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