The Eastern Wood-Pewee is heard far more than it is seen, its slow, plaintive "pee-a-wee" whistle drifting down through the canopy on hot summer afternoons when most other birds have fallen silent. Plain grayish-olive with two pale wing bars and no eye-ring, it is easy to confuse with other small flycatchers by sight — but its distinctive drawn-out song makes identification simple. It perches upright on a bare mid-canopy branch and sallies out after passing insects.
Pewees breed in mature deciduous and mixed forests throughout Michigan, arriving relatively late in May and staying into September. They are among the last flycatchers to fall quiet in late summer. Long-distance migrants, they winter in the forests of northwestern South America. Their tendency to keep singing through the heat of midday, long after the dawn chorus has ended, makes their voice one of the signature sounds of a Michigan summer woodland.
An aerial insectivore that perches on exposed dead branches and darts out to capture flying insects — flies, wasps, bees, beetles, and moths — before returning to the same perch. It rarely takes food from vegetation and does not visit feeders.
That is the Eastern Wood-Pewee, singing its own name. The lazy, plaintive whistle carries through the woods even in the heat of midday, when many other birds have gone quiet.
By sight it is very similar to the Empidonax flycatchers, but the pewee lacks an eye-ring, has longer wings, and looks dingier. Its unmistakable song is the surest way to identify it.
In the interior and edges of mature deciduous and mixed forests. It favors a perch on a dead branch partway up the canopy, where it hunts flying insects.
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