Anyone who has walked in a summer woods has heard it. It's a common sound even on the hottest, muggiest days. However, a woodlands sojourner is probably so busy swatting mosquitoes and flies, that he or she may never pay attention to the distinctive, drawn out, "peeeee-ee-weeeee" call. 

     The eastern wood pewee is common flycatcher of Virginia's summer woodlands, and is bird that sings its name! Its another one of those birds that 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. Sometimes it follows up its long song with a simple, questioning "du-weeee?"

     While we are fighting off the biting insects, the wood pewee is hunting them. It moves about the woodlands quietly when feeding. It may suddenly appear, as if out of nowhere, usually sitting on a dead branch, like the lower dead limb of a pine, about mid-level in the forest. In fact, this habit has resulted in the nickname "dead limb bird."

     It will sit patiently, like a deer hunter on stand, waiting for its quarry to come by. As an insect flies by the pewee flies out quickly to snatch the insect out of the air in typical flycatcher fashion, often with the audible snap of its bill.

     The wood pewee arrives in Virginia in late April, about the same time the colorful spring warblers begin filtering through the greening landscape. Wood pewees are found statewide, mainly in dense, mature, mixed forests, but also in orchards, parklands, and open groves of scattered trees, especially near streams or lakes.
Pewees sit very erect, with wings drooping slightly. Like all flycatchers their head seems overly large and their bodies very slim. The pewee has shorter legs and longer wings proportionately than other flycatchers. Its scientific name is "Contopus virens," means "short-footed" and "being green."

     Color-wise it is a plain looking bird. It has dark olive or grayish-olive upper parts, with its head being darker and more brownish. Its underparts are yellowish-white, with a wash of olive-gray on its breast. It measures six to six and one-half inches in length. Its larger cousin, the eastern phoebe, is similar but the pewee shows a pair of dull whitish wing bars. Other similar but smaller flycatchers (acadian, alder, least and willow), have discernible white eye rings which neither the pewee nor phoebe have.

     The pewee returns to the same woods and often the same branch to nest each year it survives. It builds its nest on a horizontal branch near or over an off shooting branch, about 12-24 feet up, although sometimes as low as six feet or as high as 60 feet. The compact structure is constructed of grasses, root fibers, bark strips, and moss, then camouflaged with lichens and held together with spider silk. The nest is lined with fine grasses and animal hair. It ends up looking like a big, flattened knot on the branch.

     Normally two to five eggs are laid; cream-colored with blotches and spots of dark brown and lilac forming a wreath at the large end. Typical of flycatchers, they aggressively defend their nest. Incubation takes about two weeks and both parents are involved in the feeding chores. Two broods are often reared, with the second brood fledging by the end of August.

     About 99 percent of this little flycatcher's diet consist of insects. It feeds on bees, wasps, mosquitoes, ants, caterpillars, grasshoppers, beetles, and --you guessed it--flies! Later in the year it will also eat wild berries, notably poison ivy and dogwood.

     With reproducing duties complete, pewees become silent as summer turns to fall. They begin leaving Virginia in mid-September again along with migrating warblers, and by mid-October all have moved south. They winter in Central America and in northern South America from Nicaragua to Columbia and Peru.