Return of Bird of the Week: Long-tailed Silky Flycatcher

Missed a post. Sorry about that. WC has by no means exhausted the genus Empidonax, but he suspects he has long since exhausted his readers’ patience with little brown jobs that look pretty much the same. We’ll stay with flycatchers, but shift to some more visually interesting species for a while. Late on one afternoon, birding along a dirt road in the cloud forests in Costa Rica, almost by accident, WC found his first Long-tailed Silky Flycatcher. What followed was pretty maddening. My Olympus E-5 DSLR camera simply could not acquire a sharp focus. It turns out that all autofocus systems have…