Eastern Kingbird (Tyrannus tyrannus)

County List:

Rule:

Mixed Forested/Nonforested or Nonforested Landscapes

1st alternative:
      Savanna
   containing:
      (Perches and Mast)

2nd alternative:
      Fields/Pasture
   containing: 
      (Perches and Mast)
   adjacent to:
      Edge


3rd alternative:
      Lowland Brush
   containing:
      Snags
   adjacent to: 
      Riparian

Habitat List:

view size class definitions

Literature:

Habitat: The kingbird is a bird of open savanna. About 60% of the Atlas Habitat Survey's 169 records came from residential/roadside habitats and old fields. Orchard, pasture, and native grassland occupy much less land area in Michigan than these two habitats and, accordingly, yielded fewer total observations, but are even more strongly preferred.

In all, kingbirds occurred in 17 of the major habitat categories. This is partly a measure of habitat flexibility but also an indication of the large acreage a kingbird territory occupies, interacting with the mixed-up nature of the current landscape. Under primeval conditions, the species probably occurred in such savanna landscapes as oak openings, the marram grass-cottonwood of dunelands, forestlands a few years following the most severe fires, and shrubby wetlands.

The kingbird is another of the many forest-edge birds that must have increased in numbers following European settlement.

Habitat: Breeding: Frequently in orchards, pastures, and shrubby borders, forest edges, along fields and highways, near streams with shrubby banks, swamps or marshes with dead stumps and snags, sometimes in open woodlands.

Special Habitat Requirements: Open situations, perches for flycatching.

Habitat: Wood edges, river groves, farms, shelterbelts, orchards, roadsides. In summer requires open space for hunting and trees for nesting; habitat ranges from clearings within forest to open grassland with few scattered trees. Often common around edges of marshes, farmland, native tall-grass prairie.

Diet: Mostly insects, some fruit. Insects make up majority of summer diet; included are many beetles, wasps, bees, winged ants, grasshoppers, flies, leafhoppers, and others. Sometimes claimed to be a serious predator of honeybees, but there is little evidence for this. Also eats many berries and wild fruits.

Nest: Site is usually in deciduous tree or large shrub, 7-30 feet above ground, sometimes lower or much higher. Sometimes on power-line towers, on dead snags standing in water, on top of fence post, or other odd site. Nest is a bulky cup of weed stalks, twigs, grass, lined with fine grass and sometimes animal hair.