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Updated: May 11, 2025
The young of both sexes don the dress of the mother bird during the first season, save that they fail to adorn themselves with a scarlet gem on the crown. Like all the members of the flycatcher group, the scissorstails capture insects while on the wing, making many an attractive picture as they perform their graceful and interesting evolutions in the air.
In the evening I returned to the enchanted spot, but the scissorstails had disappeared. Not having had my fill of these charmers, I stopped, on my return home, for a day at Wellington, Kansas, where I was so fortunate as to find three birds of this species, who permitted me to watch them to my heart's content.
To show that our birds are unique, it is relevant to say that there are only two species of scissors-tailed flycatchers in North America, which have the genus Milvulus all to themselves. He is a sort of southern twin of our scissorstail. The nests of the scissorstails are set in the crotches of trees in the neighborhood of country homes on the prairie.
*Reprinted by permission from "American Ornithology," with important additions. Several days passed before an individual of this species put in appearance, as the scissorstails, which are migrants, had not yet returned from their winter quarters in a more southern clime, and so I had to wait for their arrival.
By and by the shrike wheeled away, when, as if to bring the gladiatorial show to a climax, the scissorstails engaged in a set-to that was really wonderful, coming together in the air, whirling around and around, rising in a spiral course, opening and closing their beautiful forked tails in quick succession, the black and white trimmings flashing momentarily, then disappearing, until the contestants finally descended, parted in the most graceful manner, and alighted on separate fence posts, none the worse for their melee.
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