The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher

A Dusky-capped Flycatcher eyes me at the new Lookout.

May 21, 2025

From my high perch on the Lookout porch, I watch birds slip through the dry and skeletal oak, dark shapes shuffling in fits and starts that draw my gaze deep into the black and twisted trees. Warblers, both Townsend’s and black-throated grays, that only pause for hidden, bark-clinging insects and then move on. Kingbirds and flycatchers that prefer food on the wing, sallying into the open to dispatch breakfast with an audible snap. And now, a single dusky-capped flycatcher bends its head to look at me.

All this at eye level. It’s as if I’m seeing birds for the first time.

Two of the more common warblers of migration, a Black-throated Gray (above) and Townsend’s Warbler (below).

When a rasping shriek cuts through the woodland, the sound sparks a memory. I know what this is! I think. I turn, and a large dusty blue bird flies in my direction and lands on a branch in front of me. Last week, I wrote about Mexican jays, about their mixed paternity and cooperative social nature, how gangs of them clear the feeders with fake alarm calls. But this jay is alone. He sports white eyebrows and a white bib. “I’ve been wondering where you’ve been,” I say.

I haven’t seen a Woodhouse’s scrub-jay in seven months. Not since early last November.

Woodhouse’s Scrub-jay. #93 for the month—making 100 is looking doubtful.

For comparison, this is a California Scrub-jay from Trabuco Creek at San Juan Capistrano.

I called the bird a western scrub-jay until 2016. That’s when the American Ornithologists Union (AOU) split the species in two, the California scrub-jay and the Woodhouse’s scrub-jay, based on differences in geographic range, population traits, and appearances.

No more westerns.

California got one scrub-jay and we got the other, one named for Samuel Washington Woodhouse, a naturalist for the 1849 Sitgreaves’ expedition and the first naturalist in northern Arizona. He described four birds new to science, was bitten by a rattlesnake, got shot by a Mojave arrow, then had all manner of flora and fauna named for him, including my favorite toad.

Sorry Woodhouse. It should be the Arizona scrub-jay. If California gets a scrub-jay, we should get one named for Arizona.

You can keep the toad.

A Western Flycatcher, which just recently arrived in the yard and another bird the AOU can’t make up its mind about. Formerly, named the Western Flycatcher. Then, in 1989, the AOU split the species into two different species: the Pacific-slope flycatcher and the Cordilleran flycatcher. But, in 2023, the AOU changed its mind and lumped both to a single species once again (and thus reduced my yard list total by one bird!).

Thanks for supporting The Big Yard! More birds on the way—we’re coming up on Yellow Grosbeak season!