Scissor-tailed Flycatcher song and call

A Scissor-tailed Flycatcher sounds like a kingbird with extra energy: short, sharp kek or kit notes strung into a jumbled, sputtering chatter, often written as cah-kee, cah-key, CAH-KEY, plus a harsh kee-kee-kee-kee when it is annoyed. Flying birds keep up a kingbird-like twitter, and a displaying male adds a rolling, cackling call as he climbs and drops with his long tail opening and closing. Listen on roadside wires and fences in the southern Great Plains from April to October.

What the song sounds like

There is no sweet whistle here. The Scissor-tailed Flycatcher belongs to the kingbird family, and it talks the way kingbirds do: in dry, clipped notes. The basic unit is a kek or kit. When the bird gets going, those notes run together with two-part phrases like cac-wee or ca-leek into a fast, stuttering series that sounds less like a tune and more like someone shaking a box of small pebbles. The Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation writes the call as cah-kee, cah-key, CAH-KEY, with the last one louder.

The most memorable performance comes from the courting male. He flies up sharply, then drops, then climbs again, and the long tail streamers open and close like the tool the bird is named for (forficatus is Latin for a pair of scissors). While he does this he gives a rolling, cackling call. Even a bird just crossing a pasture keeps up a chattering twitter in flight, so you often hear a scissor-tail before you notice the tail.

The call: a harsh kee-kee-kee

The alarm is a harsh kee-kee-kee-kee, given when a hawk, a crow or a person gets too close to the nest. Like other kingbirds, scissor-tails defend their nests hard, and they chase other scissor-tails out of their territory with the same clucking and erratic chattering. The ordinary contact note is a single sharp kit, close to the note of an Eastern Kingbird and easy to overlook until you have heard it a few times.

When and where you hear it

This is a bird of the southern Great Plains. The breeding range covers Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Louisiana, Arkansas, southwestern Missouri and far eastern New Mexico, reaching into northeastern Mexico. Birds arrive in south Texas as early as late February and in Oklahoma and Missouri in April, breed from late March into late August, and head south from August through October. They winter from southern Mexico to Panama, and a small number stay in southern Florida or south Texas.

Look for semi-open country: ranches, farms, prairie with a few scattered trees, and roadsides. Scissor-tails sit on telephone wires, fence lines and flagpoles, then sail out to snap up an insect in the air or hover and pick one off the ground. Grasshoppers can make up more than half of what they eat, with beetles, crickets, wasps, bees and moths behind them and some berries in winter. The nest is a ragged cup of twigs, weeds and rootlets on a horizontal limb, 7 to 30 feet up, and where trees are scarce a utility pole or bridge girder will do.

Late summer brings the best show. Before migrating, scissor-tails gather at evening roosts in mature streamside trees, sometimes 100 to 1,000 birds in one grove, and the same roost can be used for more than twenty years. Strays turn up as far away as southern Canada and upstate New York, so an odd long-tailed bird on an eastern wire is worth a second look. In Warble the scissor-tail is the state-bird card of the Oklahoma album.

What it looks like

Once you see the tail, nothing else comes close. An adult male is 14 to 15 inches long, and up to nine inches of that is a deeply forked tail, black on top and white underneath, that opens and closes in flight. The head and back are pale pearl gray, the breast white, the wings dark, and the flanks and undertail wash to salmon pink, with a flash of red under the wing at the shoulder. The wingspan is a modest 15 to 17 inches and the whole bird weighs one to two ounces, so most of the length is feather.

Females are patterned the same way but paler, often with a yellowish tinge where the male is salmon, and their tails can be almost a third shorter. Young birds are duller still, with short, only slightly forked tails, and can pass for a Western Kingbird until you check the pink under the wing. Market hunters shot large numbers for decorative feathers in the 1800s; today the population is estimated at about 9.1 million.

Birds that sound similar

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  Eastern Kingbird

  The Eastern Kingbird's sharp dzee or dzeet and rapid kit, kitter series are the closest match. The kingbird's notes have a buzzier edge and the bird lacks the long tail and pink sides.

• ?
  Western Kingbird

  The Western Kingbird shares the same wires and farm country from Texas west and gives a loud, sharp kit with chattering notes. By ear it is nearly identical; look for its yellow belly and short square tail.

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  Great Crested Flycatcher

  The Great Crested Flycatcher's loud rising wheep is a single clear, slightly buzzy whistle, not a sputter. It also calls from inside the woods rather than from an open wire.

Where the Scissor-tailed Flycatcher card lives

In Warble the same bird can be an easy card in one state and a prized one in another, because each album ranks its birds by how often people really report them there. The Scissor-tailed Flycatcher appears in 3 state albums:

Questions people ask

Written by the Warble team from the sources above. Updated September 30, 2026.