General

Blue-gray Gnatcatcher: Small, flycatcher-like perching bird with blue-gray upperparts, white underparts, and prominent white eye-ring. Wings are dark. Black tail is long and white-edged. Female tends toward grayer tones.

Range and Habitat

Blue-gray Gnatcatcher: Breeds from northern California, Colorado, southern Great Lakes region, southern Ontario, and New Hampshire southward. Spends winters from southern California to the Gulf coast and the Carolinas. Preferred habitats include deciduous woodlands, streamside thickets, live oaks, pinyon-juniper, and chaparral.

Breeding and Nesting

Blue-gray Gnatcatcher: Four or five pale blue eggs, usually with brown flecks, are laid in a small cup nest of plant down and spider webs decorated with lichens and fastened to a horizontal branch at almost any height above the ground. Both parents incubate eggs for 13 days.

Foraging and Feeding

Blue-gray Gnatcatcher: Eats aphids, hemipterans, beetles, moths, butterflies, flies, ants, bees, wasps, and spiders; forages by moving up and down outer branches of trees or shrubs.

Readily Eats

Meal Worms, Sunflower, Nut Meal

Vocalization

Blue-gray Gnatcatcher: Song is a thin, musical warble. Call note is a distinctive, whining "pzzzz", with a nasal quality.

Similar Species

Blue-gray Gnatcatcher: Other male gnatcatchers have variable amounts of black (depending on species, season, and age) on crown. Other female gnatcatchers have brown-tinged tails.