Looking for ID help with Muscicapas and Phylloscopus in Borneo (1 Viewer)

Flycatcher

Gandytron,
good choice, the underside of the beaks in the photos are broad but not virtually triangular as in most Brown. The numerous browns in your local patch, can some have side markings like DSF?

I do get to see a few heavily marked ABF's - the most extreme example that I have images of is this one (attached, taken in the last few days of September, a few years back).

To be honest I think DSF is more obvious in the field than in still images - they often look very small-billed and are absolute suckers for exposed, dead, bare snags on trees which they seem to remain loyal to for launching aerial sorties. I find that ABF is much less loyal to a single perch.

That looks like a bird I saw in Saigon last winter, which I thought at first might be Dark-sided.

This has been an informative thread - thanks to everybody who contributed. It seems in conclusion that identifying these flycatchers from below is a little problematic - best to get a profile view.

Scott, any more blog posts coming?

gandytron said:

To be honest I think DSF is more obvious in the field than in still images - they often look very small-billed and are absolute suckers for exposed, dead, bare snags on trees which they seem to remain loyal to for launching aerial sorties. I find that ABF is much less loyal to a single perch.

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I absolutely agree. I rarely find any difficulty between these two in the field, but it's a topic that turns up fairly regularly from photos on BF. I found it useful in my previous post to explain my ID process, because it helped to focus my mind on which features were useful.

Flycatcher

Hi Gandytron and John,
agree with you John but in a wider Asian context the journey around ABF, from the top of Kinabalu to the mangroves of Krabi is still a tortuous one. Gandytron's picture perhaps shows the upper limits of the paler wing markings on an immature, ABF.

The wintering adults are usually very plain and I have never come across an obvious moulting adult. The adults seem to look perfect in feather in every month! Some also show stronger and variegated rather than plain side markings.This is probably nothing to do with moult and can be the confusion point.

For the first time visitor, like Scott, B. King's original treatment was at least reasonably accessible as a starting point, but it precludes Borneo. I have added my own sketches and annotations to this treatment but Gandytron and dig deep and others have produced great photographs as well as making more contemporary cogent comments. The earlier names of brown, chocolate, and sooty flycatcher where also easier for the first time visitor to assimilate. Great to see some behavourial attributions from direct observation as well. This has recently been discussed on bird forum.

Thanks everyone for the informative discussion!

I've learned a lot from reading this and added an 'answer key' to the bottom of the original blog post as well as links to this thread and the digdeep blog.

I had no idea what a 'Brown-streaked Flycatcher' was when I wrote this post, and after some reading, it still isn't all that clear to me!

One quick followup question about Phylloscopus: is it correct (or safest) to assume that wintering/migrating silent 'Arctic Warbler' seen in the field cannot be accurately parsed into the Japanese/Kamchatka/'arctic' trichotomy?

I have no further content to post about Muscicapa, but some of you may interested to read a birding-oriented travelogue of my 4 weeks in East Kalimantan: http://birdaholic.blogspot.ch/2016/10/the-kalimantan-krush.html

I'm back in Switzerland now, which is incredibly boring for birds, but am putting together a series of posts from 6 weeks of travelling through Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina I did over the summer.

scottwinton said:

One quick followup question about Phylloscopus: is it correct (or safest) to assume that wintering/migrating silent 'Arctic Warbler' seen in the field cannot be accurately parsed into the Japanese/Kamchatka/'arctic' trichotomy?

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Scott,

Re 'Arctic' warbler complex your assumption is correct. Vocalisation (song/call) is currently the only means of identification to species level.

Grahame

Just got my copy of Birds of the Indonesian Archipelago by Eaton, van Balen, Brickle and Rheindt in the mail today.

I'm happy to find that their descriptions seem to agree with your identifications.

It is interesting to read about Brown-streaked, Umber and the two-forms of Dark-sided Flycatcher that may be further split. Clearly all of the Dark-sided birds I photographed belong to the sibirica group rather than rothschildi.

The Phillipps' book really is rubbish for this genus.