Warbling Vireo
| Vireo gilvus | Order: Passeriformes | Family: Vireonidae (Vireos, Shrike-Babblers, and Erpornis) |
I saw my lifer Warbling Vireo the first day of my first ornithology class, though I’m sure I must have heard the song throughout May while I was searching for new birds. It stays hidden in foliage, and as my ornithology professor told us, it has NO field marks. It’s small but not distinctively tiny, has a slight eye line but not a distinctive one, has no wingbars, tail spots, streaking, or spotting, and is about as dully colored as a bird could be.
He told us the mnemonic for the song as “If I could see her I would seize her and I would squeeze her till she squirt!” The mnemonic has been sanitized to suit modern sensibilities (and, indeed, the sensibilities I already had in 1975), but unfortunately, the rushed delivery and what I call the “skeezy” quality of the song just don’t work when you change the feminine pronouns to “it.” Pete Dunne likens the song to “a happy drunk making a conversational point at a party.”
Duluth is at the very northern part of the Warbling Vireo’s range in the eastern half of the continent, but in the West the range stretches almost up to the main part of Alaska. The birds winter in western Mexico and northern Central America. At least one Warbling Vireo is known to have lived more than 13 years–that bird, banded as an adult (age unknown but at least one year old) in 1966 was retrapped and released, perfectly healthy, in 1978.