I’ll give you some hints to see if you can guess the bird.
This bird likes to sit on fences and power lines. It has a long tail that
sticks out. It has orange-salmon patches underneath its wings. Got it yet?
It’s the scissor-tail flycatcher! This is a bird that
travels through all of Texas and uses this area as a breeding ground during the
summer. They migrate through Mexico and spend the winters in Central America. During
the spring, they wander across North America and have been spotted as far north
as British Columbia.
They are a fun bird to watch in flight, because their tail
opens and closes like scissors. They are amazing acrobats to watch as they flit
around at fast speeds to catch insects and flies. One of their primary food sources
are grasshoppers, which is good news for farmers! They nest in taller trees
near open areas of grass and prairies.
Scissor tail flycatchers build their nests using grass,
Spanish moss, plastic pieces, paper, string, cigarette butts, pieces of carpet,
and almost anything else that they can scavenge from nearby. A study of nests
in Texas found that 30% of the nest materials were man-made materials that the
birds had gathered.
For more information, visit the Cornell Lab of Ornithology
website:
Here are a few videos showing this beautiful bird:
