eWestern Birds

First Record of the Small-billed Elaenia (Elaenia parvirostris) for Western North America

Nolan M. Clements and James R. Tietz

ABSTRACT: The Small-billed Elaenia (Elaenia parvirostris) is a small flycatcher common on the Atlantic slope of South America. The species breeds below 1000 m elevation in open woodlands, gardens, and forest edges from southern Brazil to northeastern Argentina and migrates north to spend the nonbreeding season in the northern Amazon Basin. Since 2012, it has been documented as a vagrant to North America, with four records from the United States and Canada to date. On the basis of one photographed on Southeast Farallon Island on 4 September 2022, we record a fifth Small-billed Elaenia in North America, a first for California and the Pacific coast. Its novelty notwithstanding, it represents an outlier of an established pattern of vagrancy of tyrant flycatchers from South America reaching North America via overshooting or reverse migration.

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