A Black Phoebe in Minnesota?!
A delightful southwestern bird belonging to a species not known for wandering is far, far from home.
(Listen to the radio version here.)
On Christmas 1974, I got the two most perfect gifts of my entire life thanks to Russ, who had asked his parents to give me a pair of binoculars and a field guide to birds. We have two photos of me with the brand-new binoculars…
… but there’s no photographic evidence of the moment I most vividly remember from that wonderful day: opening that Peterson guide.1
In the next few days, I read it cover to cover. How could there possibly be so many birds? One little bird was slate-colored on its head, upper breast, back, and tail, but had a white tummy—that would be easy to remember!
With all the strange new names and ornithological vocabulary sloshing around in my brain like alphabet soup, its name didn’t stick in my head.
After I finished reading the Peterson guide, I bought and read the Golden Guide cover to cover, and somewhere in the middle, I came across that slate gray bird with the white tummy. Yes! It was a Black Phoebe! I was sure I could remember that.
But when I got close to the back of the Golden Guide, oops—there it was again, but now they were calling what looked like the exact same bird a Slate-colored Junco!
How on earth was I ever going to master this birding stuff?
The Golden Guide did have range maps, and when I went back to the Black Phoebe entry, I saw that it could be found only in the Southwest and up the California coast—places I couldn’t imagine ever getting to.2
That explained why it wasn’t in the Peterson guide, which included only Eastern species. So I was certain if I ever saw a slate-gray bird with a white tummy, it would be a junco.
Sure enough, on March 21, 1975, right after I started birding, I saw my first junco in Russ’s parents’ backyard—# 13 on my life list. I saw several more that spring, and by autumn, juncos were easy.
But I still felt unsure about whether I’d be able to tell a junco from a Black Phoebe if I ever did make it to the Southwest, so I carefully studied a lot of juncos. Every one of them had a pale, pinkish bill which was also quite thick.
The illustrations of the Black Phoebe showed it with a slender, black bill.
It took a year or more for me to feel confident about recognizing flycatchers by their bill shape and somewhat vertical stance, often sallying forth to snatch insects in mid-air, and never hopping or scratching on the ground.
Eastern Phoebes nested at the Kellogg Biological Station where I took a field ornithology class in June 1975.
The Eastern Phoebe was the first species I added to my life list during that class (#41), and I had plenty of opportunities to observe them wagging their tail, a habit shared with the Black Phoebe but not the junco. Maybe I’d get the hang of birding yet!
A full seven years later, in April 1982, when our first baby was six months old, Russ had a meeting in Las Vegas and enough vacation time saved up that we made it into a family trip, heading to the Grand Canyon and Southeast Arizona after his meeting.
A wonderful birder from Las Vegas, Marian Cressman, took me birding for two full days while Russ was at his sessions even though I warned her that I’d have baby Joey along—she was fine with that.
With Marian, I saw several treasured lifers, including Burrowing Owl, Lewis’s Woodpecker, and Phainopepla, and also my very first Black Phoebe (#419). I was thrilled, and very proud of myself for figuring that one out on my own thanks to its black bill, tail-wagging, and fluttering out to capture insects on the wing. I saw Black Phoebes a few times in Arizona on that trip, too. Since then, I’ve seen them many times in five states in the Southwest, and also in Costa Rica and Mexico.
Obviously I’ve never ever seen a Black Phoebe in the Midwest—there are absolutely no records ever of one showing up anywhere near here. Well, there weren’t any records in Minnesota until just this Saturday afternoon (October 25, 2025), when a birder named Ben Stubbs found one in the Agate Bay parking lot in Gooseberry Falls. The bird moved to the lagoon where a lot more birders saw it. I didn’t notice the message about it until later in the afternoon; Frank Nicoletti and I decided to try for it Sunday morning.
It was a perfect day for a drive up the shore. Most of the leaves were gone but the fall colors were still pretty. When we got to the place where the bird was supposed to be, it was like a fun reunion—Jan and Larry Kramer were there, my birding friend and my daughter’s neighbor Bruce Munson, and a host of others. The phoebe had been seen a few minutes before we got there, but some people besides us hadn’t seen it yet, so even as people chatted and caught up, everyone kept their binoculars trained to the areas where it was last seen. And suddenly, Frank spotted it! It was tiny and all the way across the lagoon, tricky for my old eyes to spot, but I grabbed a few marginal and highly cropped photos.
And just like that, I had a new Minnesota bird for the second weekend in a row!
What brought the little thing so far from home? Black Phoebes aren’t particularly migratory—indeed, many pairs remain on and near their breeding territories year-round. Since I started birding, they’ve extended their range further north along the Pacific Coast and into northern Arizona and New Mexico and even into much of Utah and western Colorado.
Although this range expansion is almost certainly due in part to climate change, their adapting to urban parks, beaches, and waterfronts must also be a factor.
But even as they’ve moved northward, Black Phoebes are not known for wandering. There are a handful of Florida records, but this is a first anywhere in the Midwest. Oddly enough, by Sunday night one “cool fact” in the Cornell Lab’s All About Birds entry read:
Black Phoebes don’t usually venture outside their breeding and wintering areas, but on rare occasions they are seen as far east as Florida. One misplaced bird showed up in Minnesota in the fall.
Someone at the Cornell Lab must have been hard at work this weekend.
This little bird wasn’t seen after about noon on Sunday. Birders will still be searching for a day or two, and I’ll feel bad for them if it’s gone for good, but then again, I’m hoping against hope that the little guy works its way back to where it belongs ASAP.
[UPDATE: John Richardson reported it again in the same place on Monday morning. It was still being seen in the afternoon.]
Whenever you leave, Godspeed, little bird.
Believe it or not, I opened the field guide to exactly the page where the Ovenbird was. I’d found a dead Ovenbird in the Chicago Loop when I was in high school and had no idea what it could be, but I felt cosmically sad. Now I knew exactly what it was and knew there was a good chance I could see a wild alive Ovenbird one day! Early editions of the Peterson guide didn’t have range maps, but the description of the range suggested that I could maybe see a live one in Illinois or Michigan, where we were then living. (Spoiler alert: I did!)
I learned later that the Black Phoebe is also found throughout Central America and well into South America, way way way beyond the limits of my imagination back then!
PS My spelling isn't so good anymore: slated colored Junco...it was fun to see how much you learned of the black phoebe and to see one in Duluth!!
What a great story! Junoes were my first bird to identify by myself...Tarry and I were in the Twin Cities getting my heart checked out at Abbott and in the tree outside our window there were a flock of these little gray birds...when we got back home I hurried to my bird guide and discovered what they were called...since then I enjoyed them coming to my feeder right up til the time we left for Ohio. My Dad used to work at the Kellogg biological station and my grandparents lived in Hickory Corners!