“The notes of Traill’s Fly-catcher consist of the sounds wheet, wheet, which it articulates clearly while on wing.  It resides in the skirts of the woods along the prairie lands of the Arkansas River, where alone I have been able to procure it.  When leaving the top branches of a low tree, this bird takes long flights, skimming in zigzag lines, passing close over the tops of the tall grasses, snapping at and seizing different species of winged insects, and returning to the same trees to alight.

. . . I have named this species after my learned friend Dr. Thomas Stewart Traill of Liverpool, in evidence of the gratitude which I cherish towards that benevolent gentleman for all his kind attentions to me.”

–J. J. Audubon, Ornithological Biography, I (1831), 236 [excerpted].