They're back!

And bobbing their tails

Apr 09, 2026

Robin running across the lawn, song sparrow singing his heart out in the hawthorn, belted kingfisher flying along the lakeshore with a rattling cry—it’s reassuring and wonderful, having the neighbours back after months of solitude and silence. Each new arrival is cause for comment and congratulations—they made it home from wherever they spent the winter!—and reason for celebration. So glad, so grateful, all’s right with the world.

But then I looked out the front window and spotted a small bird perched on the garden fence, pale breast, brown back, tail bobbing. A phoebe! No surprise there, really. Eastern phoebes are always the earliest flycatchers to return. What did surprise me was the wave of happiness that instantly warmed my heart.

Phoebes aren’t flashy, colourful or dramatic. Not melodic either, that raspy, rising-falling “fee-be, fee-be” song they often repeat. Shy, retiring, they quietly come and go, flitting down into the garden to snatch an insect, then back up on a fence post to eat it. Why so much fondness for these little brown birds? Because they’re such good neighbours, polite, well-behaved, dependable. And darling.

They like living out in the country alongside humans, building their grass-and-moss cup nests on a ledge under an eave, out of the rain. Or under a bridge in a rural area, not far from trees and shrubs. Everywhere I’ve found a phoebe nest I was glad to be there—cottage country porches, the cabin in the sugar bush, old buildings along rivers on canoe trips. And once on a jagged rock face at the end of Fishog Lake in the Queen Elizabeth II Wildlands, cliffs being traditional nesting sites for them before Homo sapiens’ North American building boom.

It was Dennis’s mom who taught me to love phoebes as much as she did, up at the family farm. Pearl wasn’t really a birder, but had a lifelong connection with these little birds that raised babies in the woodshed beside her kitchen every spring. Which they still do, even though she’s not there to welcome them.

My own delight deepened when a phoebe moved into our yard and built a nest on a 2x4 Dennis put up for her above a sunroom window one spring. For more than a month we watched in awe, monitoring her every move as she entertained us, incubating her clutch of eggs, then faithfully filling those gaping mouths—were there really six babies crammed in that tiny moss cradle? Which all fledged at once one sunny morning, spreading out across the neighbourhood and leaving us “empty-nesters” lonely and bereft.

Our phoebe returned the following spring, only to have her first brood predated by a red squirrel. She moved to a neighbour’s shed, where a cowbird chick hatched first and took over. Since then no phoebes have nested nearby, but I catch my breath whenever I hear that familiar “fee-be” call.

And seeing one back this week, perched on the garden fence, bobbing its tail… It’s not just bluebirds that warm your heart with happiness.