Scissor-tailed Flycatcher

How to find it

Scan open country from a car, checking fence posts, utility wires and bare branches along rural roads. A perched male stands out because the long tail streamers hang below the perch. Guanacaste rice fields are worth a visit, and an afternoon at the Las Trancas rice fields, near Horizontes south of Santa Rosa, gave excellent looks at many birds. In the south, a tour report says a couple of known fields often hold wintering birds, and one bird flew out from a fencerow after insects. Once you find a bird, watch its chosen perch, since it often comes back to it.

How to recognise it

Adults have a pale gray head and back, whitish underparts, salmon-pink sides and flanks, and bright red patches under the wing. The tail is very long, deeply forked, and mostly white on the outer feathers.

Males have a longer tail than females, and the female is duller. Young birds have much shorter tails and duller, yellowish-pink underparts, so a short-tailed bird in winter may be a first-year bird rather than a different species.

What it sounds like

Recording: Meghan Cassidy, CC BY-SA 4.0, source, read 4 Nov 2026.

Behaviour and diet

It usually perches in the open and watches from there, then flies out to catch insects in flight, with sharp twists and turns. It takes them from the air, and also from the ground and plants. It often returns to the same perch after each insect-catching flight.

In late summer and early fall, the birds gather in large, noisy flocks to migrate south. Pre-migration roosts can hold up to 1,000 birds, often in large trees near towns.

Where it lives

It lives in semi-open country, such as open land with scattered trees and shrubs. In winter it is found in open grassland, farm fields and forest edges.

Its winter range runs from southern Mexico to central Costa Rica, and sometimes reaches southwestern Panama, so Costa Rica is near the southern edge of where it normally winters. In Costa Rica it has been met on the Pacific side, in Guanacaste and Puntarenas, and in a roadside pasture in the south.

When to see it

Birds are on the wintering grounds from October through March in general, a statement about the whole wintering range. In Costa Rica, adults including a male, a female and a first-fall bird were photographed in Liberia on 14 November, so some have arrived by mid-November, and other photo records fall in January and February.

Similar birds

The only other kingbird with a dramatically long tail is the Fork-tailed Flycatcher. Otherwise the Scissor-tailed Flycatcher looks and sounds much like other kingbirds.

Young birds look a bit like a Western Kingbird, and Costa Rican birders can confuse the two. The young Scissor-tail has no pure yellow on the belly, and its tail is longer, narrower, more forked and whiter.

Names and lore in Costa Rica

Besides the AOCR name Tijereta Rosada (Tijerilla), the bird is also called Cola de Tijeras. Other Spanish names include tirano-tijereta rosado and papamoscas cola de tijera. The scientific name forficatus comes from a Latin word for a pair of scissors, the root of the English scissor-tail and the Spanish tijereta.

Status and conservation

The AOCR list marks it as a migrant (M), and it is rated Least Concern, with a population estimated at several million.

Photography tips

Because it often returns to the same perch after each insect-catching flight, a photographer gets repeat chances. Pick a bird on an open fence post or wire and wait for it to sally out and come back. Open grassland, farm fields and forest edges are the places to try.