12 May 2014. Cayuga ON. I did the daily census at the bird observatory today and managed to find well over fifty species. Three stand out as noteworthy: a handful of Yellow-throated Vireos; a pair of Orchard Orioles and one particularly obliging Warbling Vireo.
I didn’t actually see the Yellow-throated Vireos; I simply heard them. A quick look back and you’ll see that I have a soft spot for vireos. I’ve already celebrated White-eyed and Warbling Vireos this year, and late last summer: Philadelphia, Red-eyed and Yellow-throated Vireos all took centre stage at one time or another. None of them on account of anything as shallow as showy plumage, but more because, despite their generally unremarkable appearance, they either sing quite nicely or possess a certain air of self confidence without being overly aggressive.
At one point in the census round, I heard a short fluting song repeated over and over from the top of a large, riverside Black Willow. I jumped to attention because I’d heard that song, exactly the same song, this time last year, but despite a lengthy search had been unable to find the bird responsible. I had recorded the song on my camera (versatile little thing) and played it back later to an attentive but largely unhelpful audience in the banding lab. That was last year, and now here it was again, note for note. This time though it was close and I had a good chance of being able to pinpoint the source of the song; I just needed the bird to move a foot or two. Eventually it did and I was astonished to see that the performer was a male Orchard Oriole and, based on some research in a sound bank of bird song recordings, I learned that Orchard Orioles’ songs vary quite a bit. I’m pretty sure that today I was hearing the same individual as last year. And well, why not? We know from banding recoveries that the same birds return year after year, it’s just a marvel to think that in the intervening period this bird has quite possibly been to Costa Rica and back.
Then there was the Warbling Vireo. Apart from their overall drabness and contrasting, tumbling song, one characteristic of these birds is their propensity for staying high in the tree canopy where you hear but rarely see them. Today though, I was standing on an elevated bank when I spotted a Warbling Vireo hopping around almost at my eye level. Knowing that the chances of getting a decent photo were slim with a bird continually on the move and a camera that frequently prefers to auto-focus on something quite unrelated, to my delight I managed to get a few quite acceptable shots, enough anyway to consider this obliging Warbling Vireo my Bird of the Day. 