The Yellow-bellied Flycatcher is, as its name promises, the yellowest of the small Empidonax flycatchers, washed with soft yellow on the throat and belly and greenish above, with a bold yellowish eye-ring. That yellow tone is one of the few plumage clues that helps separate it from its drabber relatives, though as with all "empids," voice is the surest guide: it gives a soft, plaintive, rising "chu-wee" or "che-lek," gentler than the emphatic songs of the Least or Acadian Flycatchers.
This is a bird of cool, damp northern forests, breeding in spruce and tamarack bogs and mossy coniferous woods across northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula, where it nests low, often on the ground in moss at the base of a tree. Elsewhere in the state it is seen only as a migrant, moving through in spring and fall. Retiring and easily overlooked, it forages quietly in the shaded lower and middle levels of the forest, sallying for insects. Its yellow wash and bog-forest habitat make it one of the more identifiable of the tricky empids.
Sallies from perches in the forest understory and midstory to catch flying insects and gleans insects and spiders from foliage, hunting quietly in cool, shaded coniferous woods and bogs. It takes flies, small wasps, beetles, and other insects, often foraging fairly low.
It is the yellowest of the small Empidonax flycatchers, with a yellow-washed throat and belly, greenish upperparts, and a bold yellowish eye-ring. Its soft, plaintive rising call and preference for cool bog forest also help.
In cool, damp spruce and tamarack bogs and mossy coniferous forest in the northern Lower Peninsula and Upper Peninsula, where it nests low, often on the ground in moss. Elsewhere it is only a migrant.
As a migrant in spring and fall, moving between its northern breeding bogs and its wintering grounds in Central America. It arrives relatively late in spring like several empids.
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