Features: The Acadian Flycatcher( Empidonax virescens) is a small olive-green songbird that, like others members of its genus, has a pale eye ring, light-coloured wing bars and a short brown bill with a slightly hooked tip. It is best identified by its song, an emphatic ("ka-zeep"). This flycatcher is a bird of the forest interior and requires large tracts of mature, shady, maple-beech forest. It selects a forked branch in a tree or shrub, often close to a stream, as the site in which to build its hanging nest. Three white or buff-coloured eggs speckled with brown are laid in this loosely woven structure. As the name suggests, this is an insectivorous, or insect-eating bird, and it hunts by darting out from a perch to capture prey on the wing.

Status: Endangered Provincially and Nationally

Range: The range of the Acadian Flycatcher extends from southern Ontario south to Texas, and east across the southcentral United States. It migrates to wintering grounds in Central America and northern South America. In Ontario, it is believed that there are fewer than 40 breeding pairs scattered throughout suitable habitat in the Carolinian Forest Zone.

Threats: The major threat is habitat loss due to forest clearing and fragmentation.

Protection: This species is protected under the federal Migratory Birds Convention Act. The Acadian Flycatcher is also listed under Ontario's Endangered Species Act, 2007, which protects the species from being killed, harmed, or possessed. Almost 50% of the Acadian Flycatchers that currently breed in Ontario occur in provincial parks, national parks, and conservation areas or nature reserves, where the birds and their habitat are protected. A national recovery team has prepared a draft recovery plan for both the Acadian Flycatcher and the Hooded Warbler. The plan recommends measures necessary for the preservation of these forest interior birds in Ontario.

Text Sources: Bull and Farrand 1977; Godfrey 1986; Page and Cadman 1994a

Last Modified Date: October 2008