A pair of scissor-tailed flycatchers takes up residence every spring at the same spot along a road near my college in northern Harris County.
Migratory songbirds claiming nesting territory at an exact location for 30 years straight would not be surprising had the territory not been significantly altered. But in this case, the songbirds' preferred fields and grasslands have been subdued by expanded roadways, business centers and acres of paved parking lots.
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Nature notes: scissor-tailed flycatcher
Both sexes have light-gray heads and backs, crimson shoulder patches, salmon-colored flanks.
They migrate overland from winter homes in Central America and southern Mexico.
Look for them on fence lines or wires near fields and around golf courses, park meadows and small towns.
It's the state bird of Oklahoma and also is called "Texas bird-of-paradise."
They're not the same birds as 30 years ago - they don't live that long - but a pair still inhabits the spot year after year. They must be finding sufficient patches of bug-laden fields among the sprawling concrete to sustain breeding, as well as the feeding of their young. It's remarkable behavior and a testament to the tenacity of birds to hang on to nesting grounds.
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Scissor-tailed flycatchers are elegant birds, arriving in the Houston area from Latin America to set up "housekeeping," so to speak, for spring and summer. They get their name from a bifurcated tail with 6-inch- to 9-inch-long outer feathers - longer on males than on females - that stream like ribbons past the inner tail feathers.
They are in the same genus, Tyrannus, as the Eastern kingbird of our area and the Western kingbird of the Texas Hill Country, birds that launch aerial sorties from fixed perches to capture insects. But scissor-tailed flycatchers have fancier tails.
With tails torquing in flight, the birds move with quick but graceful twists and turns while zooming up and down in maneuvers that would be the envy of the best of ballet dancers. But the birds aren't dancing, they're marauding insects.
They prefer to seize ground-hugging or bush-clinging insects such as grasshoppers, crickets and caterpillars, which they pluck up with scarcely a pause in their wing beats or scissoring tails. They also make lightning-fast aerial gyrations to snap up flying insects. No zigzagging airborne insects, be it dragonfly, bee or wasp, can escape the beak of a scissor-tailed flycatcher.
So why are birds that traditionally require open fields getting along just fine around a busy business district?
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An examination of the habitat reveals abundant insects in grass-lined ditches and roadways, grass along a railroad right-of-way, meadows by buildings, a soccer field and insect-ridden parking lots along with utility lines and fence lines. It turns out there's no shortage of food for the flycatchers - and plenty of perches, too.
That's not to imply that birds adapt to dramatic alterations of their habitat. It is to imply that saving enough bird habitat saves birds.
