How to Win the Flycatcher Vote

The flycatchers are back! Great Crested Flycatchers, Willow Flycatchers, Eastern Wood Peewees, Acadian Flycatchers, and others have arrived in Northern Virginia from the tropics and will breed across our region in the coming months.

Flycatchers are ecological indicators of environmental health. As the Wildlife Sanctuary Program of the Northern Virginia Bird Alliance teaches, it’s the animals, not the people, who vote on habitat health. While the flycatcher populations have dropped over the decades with habitat loss, many still find what they need here and continue to return.

How do we keep winning the flycatcher vote? It all comes down to native plants and trees – the base of every terrestrial food web on planet earth.

Let’s start with their food. Flycatchers only eat insects, and a wide variety thereof despite their name. Bees, wasps, flies, winged ants, moths, caterpillars, and beetles are all on the menu. They don’t visit bird feeders. Only abundant and diverse insect populations will sustain them. Never doubt that the native plants, flowers, shrubs, and trees you plant are doing just that – creating abundant and diverse insect populations for all insect eaters to enjoy.

Their nesting requirements are just as particular. They are cavity nesters, using abandoned woodpecker holes, crags, and other naturally occurring crevices. Only woods that are not over-managed by people offer what they need. Biodiversity matters as well. Some flycatchers incorporate snake skins, mosses, lichens, spider silk, and other naturally occurring materials into their nests. Native trees, shrubs, and plants attract every manner of native wildlife these birds need to thrive.

Flycatchers clearly find such habitats here, though they’re not as common as we’d like. Perhaps we could expand the birds’ summer nesting sites if we thought more broadly about what already exists that attracts them to our region.

All properties in Northern Virginia are in watersheds, and some of those properties are near, or even contiguous with, the stream valleys and woods that comprise and surround them. If your property is contiguous to watershed woods, perhaps think of ways to extend those woods onto your property with new native plants, shrubs, and trees that invite what already lives there to share your outdoor habitat. If your property doesn’t physically touch the watershed woods, perhaps consider it a steppingstone for new wildlife to explore. In either event, all efforts to increase the density of native plants and the pollinators who use them could be all that’s needed to win the flycatcher vote.

Ideas on how to invite wildlife onto your property from contiguous woodlands with specific advice about what to plant can be found here on the Plant NOVA Natives website. In addition, the Wildlife Sanctuary Program of the Northern Virginia Bird Alliance can offer guidance on this process.

Great Crested Flycatchers need native plants!