Bird of the Month: Eastern Kingbird

Eastern Kingbird. Photo by Jeff Bryant.

By Roger Digges, CCAS Vice-President

People sometimes ask me, “What’s your favorite bird?” Since I like so many birds, that’s a hard question to answer. It depends on the season. I love hearing Great Horned Owl couples “talking” to each other in winter, woodcocks doing their sky dance in early spring, Baltimore Orioles singing their melodic songs in late spring, male Red-winged Blackbirds boldly harassing crows, hawks, even deer away from their nests in summer, and singing Song Sparrows making even the dreariest day of winter more enjoyable. But today, as I write in early summer, I have to say my favorite bird is the Eastern Kingbird.

Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology’s All About Birds describes this elegant member of the flycatcher family almost perfectly: “With dark gray upperparts and a neat white tip to the tail, the Eastern Kingbird looks like it’s wearing a business suit.” It’s always looked to me like it’s wearing a tuxedo, but...close enough. For me, the kingbird’s almost hovering flight is a sure sign of its identity when it’s foraging for insects, and the crisp white tip of its tail marks it when it is flying directly from perch to perch. The song, while intricate, is thin and high-pitched, too much so for those of us for whom aging has denied the upper range of our hearing.

You are most likely to find Eastern Kingbirds in open fields or prairie near woodland edges. Kingbirds perch atop trees, fence posts, utility wires, or shrubs, ready to catch their next morsel. Besides Meadowbrook Park in Urbana, the Buffalo Trace Prairie at Lake of the Woods, Point Pleasant Wetland at Middle Fork Forest Preserve, the ponds near the Moorman Swine Research Unit in Champaign, many other open areas are great places to find this attractive bird. Unlike our more furtive birds of the month, the kingbird is easy to spot once you find one.

This flycatcher’s Latin name, Tyrannus tyrannus, which means tyrant or king, signifies that this bird brooks no trespassers in its territory, whether they are other kingbirds, crows, hawks, or squirrels. All About Birds notes that kingbirds have been known to knock blue jays out of their trees.   

Eastern Kingbirds begin arriving in our area from wintering grounds in South America in the late April. Their numbers peak in late July to early August when they have successfully fledged their young. The female kingbird, which looks the same as the male, takes 1–2 weeks to build a nest of twigs, roots, bark, and other rough materials on the outside and a soft inner cup of stuff like cottonwood fluff, cattail down, and willow catkins. Into that cup she lays 2–5 eggs, which she will incubate for 14–17 days. While young kingbirds are able to leave the nest within 16–17 days, their parents continue to feed them for seven weeks, which explains why Eastern Kingbirds only raise one brood of young a season. Kingbirds begin to leave our area in late summer, their numbers gradually diminishing over the next month. During that time Eastern Kingbirds change their diet. While throughout their stay in our area, these birds supplement their main food source of insects with fruit, which provides them with water, late in the season they gradually increase their intake of fruit, until, on their wintering grounds, they eat mostly fruit.

How are Eastern Kingbirds doing? As with most bird species, their numbers declined between 1966 and 2019, in their case by 41%, perhaps due to habitat loss because of urbanization or reversion of fields to forests, insecticides, or being hit by motor vehicles since they often forage close to roads. While 26 million of these splendid birds still visit North America annually, we need to address these issues, which affect many birds.