John James Audubon named 16 birds in the Muscicapa genus. There are no additional records of two of them: Bonaparte’s flycatcher (Plate 5) and the Small-headed fly-catcher (Plate 434, #2). All of the rest of the birds in the Muscicapa genus have been re-classified into either eight new genus of flycatchers or the American redstart (Plate 40).
What mostly seemed to differentiate the Small Green-crested flycatcher from the other flycatchers was its quarrelsome nature. Audubon noted the Small Green-crested flycatcher as “Almost as pugnacious as the Eastern King-bird [Plate 79].” Although for Birds of America, Audubon changed the name of the species from Muscicapa querula, as assigned by Alexander Wilson (1766-1813), to Muscicapa acadia in reference to seeing the bird as far north as the Acadian regions of Maine and Nova Scotia. Since then the common name for the Small Green-crested flycatcher has been changed to the Acadian flycatcher with the current epithet of Empidonax virescens in reference to the green color of the bird’s back and crest. Of all the birds to identify, few are as difficult as the flycatchers.