The songbirds that 'preach' from the treetops: Nature News

Back during COVID, I was doing online yoga with a friend in Maine. I remember it was summer, and a bird was singing incessantly in her yard that I didn’t know - its song made me feel like I was in a tropical paradise.

Identifying bird songs has always been a problem for me. I don’t have a good acoustic memory. In the old days, I would hear a bird singing while on a walk and try my hardest to come up with some sort of mnemonic device to remember it. Invariably, by the time I made it home to a bird book or a tape of bird calls, I would be unable to remember it. With newer technology, especially bird call ID apps like Merlin, I have been able to overcome this. And so, I eventually recorded this wonderful, mysterious bird song that haunted our yoga sessions and found out it was a red-eyed vireo.

This past weekend, I attended a "Talking with Birds" workshop hosted by the Center for Wildlife featuring Dan Gardoqui of Lead with Nature (leadwithnature.com). A group of us met at the Center and then ventured out into a drizzly, cold morning to listen for birds. Not a lot of birds were calling that morning, but one bird, the red-eyed vireo, was there, serenading us along every forested path we followed. This is a bird that I think all of us who live in New England should get to know. They are common. Once you learn to recognize their distinctive call, you will hear them all spring and summer long.

Red-eyed vireos are hard to see. They are olive-gray birds that blend in well with the springtime foliage. They tend to hang out up high — they are little tree-top singers. Right now, the males are here, showing off, singing all day, waiting for the females to arrive.

Red-eyed vireos have been clocked at as many as 23,000 songs a day! A nickname for these birds is the preacher bird–because they "preach" all day long. Their song is variable but sounds sort of like, “look at me…here I am… in a tree... look at me.” Look up their song online once you hear it because it will be hard to forget.

One of the reasons for all the singing is that this time of year, these male birds are loaded with testosterone — their primary goal right now is to establish a territory and woo the ladies. Part of their courtship involves building a nest. Dan related a story of watching a male, red-eyed vireo this past week stripping bark off of a birch to make a demo nest to impress the females, who are due to arrive in the near future. The males migrate first, find a piece of the woods that they think is cool, build a nest and hang out, ready to show off. The funny thing is that when the female arrives and is duly impressed, the first thing she does is destroy the nest, and then the couple builds a new nest together.

You can expect vireos to be singing now through the end of July, but only if you are in a forest. These are habitat specialists. In the same way that some of us prefer the city and some the country, red-eyed vireos prefer forest to suburb landscapes with their lawns and edge habitats.

Red-eyed vireos are extremely common migratory songbirds that settle down to breed in our area. Go to the woods, and you will hear them singing non-stop throughout the spring and summer. They are here for our abundance of insects, as are many songbirds that migrate to New England. This is one of the things that makes New England so special. Yes, the annoying black flies are out, and the mosquitoes are close on their heels, but this is why so many birds migrate to our region. It’s all about the bugs! I like to remember this when I am in the woods and hear the familiar refrain of a red-eyed vireo. As I swat away yet another mosquito, I remember that these bugs are precious food for birds busy feeding their young, so don a mosquito head net and continue listening to the chorus of happy migratory songbirds.

Susan Pike, a researcher and an environmental sciences and biology teacher at Dover High School, welcomes your ideas for future column topics. Send your photos and observations to [email protected]. Read more of her Nature News columns at Seacoastonline.com and pikes-hikes.com, and follow her on Instagram @pikeshikes.

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Red-eyed vireo: Songbirds that 'preach' from the treetops