White-eyed Vireos and Prairie Warblers

The morning of May 1 2014 . Cape May N.J. It’s the geography of Cape May that makes it a birding hotspot. The low-lying, well treed and marsh-girdled peninsula stands on the north side of the shortest crossing point of the wide Delaware River estuary. It beckons spring migrants on their way to their northern breeding grounds. It is also on the Atlantic coastal route of millions of shorebirds also heading north.   It’s also warmer than Ontario being perhaps three weeks ahead in its unfolding spring, so I made my own migration to it to see what all the fuss is about.

This morning, as the remnants of a soaking, three-day storm blew its last couple of rain showers around, I set out to explore some of Cape May’s nature reserves. Higbee Beach Wildlife Management Area is a jumbled collection of open field, woodland, swamp and scrubby beach dune. To provide a blow by blow account of a birder’s morning is not really the purpose of this site and would quickly become tedious. Let me just say that it was a very rich few hours that produced at least two stand-out sightings; both stopped me in my tracks with songs heard long before I tracked down the culprit.

A bold and liquid call, “CHK t-cheewoo – chk” repeated endlessly, turned out to be a White-eyed Vireo, a rarity in Ontario. After a while I realised that there were several of them around and that individuals’ songs varied somewhat. The common feature in all of them was the emphatic opening CHK!. I enjoyed long moments watching two of them and trying to commit to memory the song, or at least its general flavour. I met another other birder who suggested the useful mnemonic of “Quick – get me beer, chick.”

A little later I heard a song that I knew I should know, a thin, dry, ascending zuu zuu zu zu zu zu z-z zip. Racking my brains I narrowed it down to a warbler species but couldn’t get any closer. Finally the bird showed itself and everything fell into place, a Prairie Warbler, another Ontario rarity. I’d studied one a couple of summers ago when it seemed a pair set up to breed not far from home; it all came back to me. In a while it was apparent that there were many Prairie Warblers around. A little later as I sat on an elevated viewing platform, two of them chased each other around totally oblivious to my presence. But they are busy little things and plentiful as they turned out to be, they were devilishly hard to photograph; I have many bad pictures of them but this one of a female is pleasing.

Prairie Warbler in Sassafrass flowers
Prairie Warbler in Sassafrass flowers

My morning’s tally was 37 species which also included a Black & White Warbler, Common Yellowthroat, Northern Waterthrush, Yellow-rumped Warbler and American Redstart, all members of that treasured bunch of migrants the wood warblers. And then there was a Chimney Swift wheeling overhead, a Baltimore Oriole, noisy but unseen, and an adult Bald Eagle chasing an Osprey trying to steal its recently captured and still squirming fish.

Birds of the Morning were undoubtedly the White-eyed Vireos and Prairie Warblers. And that was just the morning. The afternoon was to be quite another adventure.