Flying with Scissors

Running with scissors may not be the best of ideas, but on my commute to work at the Nature center, I get a chance to see that flying with scissors can be a very cool thing.   I travel along a straight road with pastures and fence-line trees on either side and the ubiquitous telephone wires, preferred perching spot for so many birds, today, were featuring those fabulous birds of the southwest, Scissor-tail Flycatchers.

These birds have the most outlandishly long tails, the males tail is almost twice as long as the females.  All the better to dazzle her with, with his mating ritual known as a Sky Dance which has him climbing upwards of 100 feet to hover, then swoop down into a barrel roll making crazy kamikaze sounds as he does it!  Wow!  And they say "texting" while driving is dangerous!  Being wowed by antics such as these will have you in a ditch in no time!  Lucky for me the roads are straight in this section.  I have read that they can do a reverse summersault as they dive which would be cooler than cool to see, but I feel lucky just to have seen this one crazy wild dive.  

These birds are in the Flycatcher family and in the past I have seen them fly off their perch to snatch a bug midair, or hop to the ground to get a grasshopper and even that is cool to watch to see how their tail fans and snaps together to help them swerve mid-flight.

 

  I have read that they have the pugnacity typical of the Flycatcher family. A favorite of mine from Cape Cod was always the Kingbird (Tyrannus, tyrannus) that would chase off any hawk or crow that dared to enter its domain.  I hear the Scissor-tail does the same thing, only, where I am, there aren’t too many hawks about to demonstrate its bravado on.   Chasing vultures might be impressive though, especially as they are always about by the dozens.

Their preference for eating agricultural pests like grasshoppers and crickets makes them a favorite with farmers and, now that hats aren’t festooned with their feathers, they are doing fairly well as a species.  This fall I will have to keep an eye out for the roosts of these birds that are said to number in the 1,000’s as they prepare to migrate to southern Mexico and Central America.  I love this- a group of Scissor-tail’s can be called collectively, a “pinking, a snip or a zipper”!  This fall, then, I hope to see a “zipper” of Scissor-tails.

Oklahoma has not only snapped up this bird as it’s State bird, but has built the Sky Dance Bridge in  Oklahoma City which emulates the bird in its design and is considered one of the top 50 art projects in the country.

 And in case you are wondering, the young don’t come instantly equipped with the long tail, or how would they ever fit in the nest. It comes in gradually over the first year. 

 So, flying with scissors, totally recommended.