The One That Got Away, and the One That Didn't (but just barely)
Park Point in Duluth has been a happenin' place!
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One of the birds I love seeing every time I visit Florida, no matter what time of year, is the White-eyed Vireo. This little bird is all the things Lou Grant described Mary Richards as in the old Mary Tyler Moore Show: spunky, perky, and plucky, and the bird’s sputtery song reminds me of Mary Richards hemming and hawing when she was flustered.
Florida is the southern state I visit most often because my son lives there, but I’ve seen White-eyed Vireos during the breeding season in 6 states from Oklahoma and Delaware south to Texas, and also in two other countries—Mexico and Cuba. They breed as far north as Illinois and even southern Wisconsin, but I’ve never seen them there during the breeding season. Oddly enough, I did see one once in Madison, Wisconsin, but that was shockingly during the Christmas Bird Count in 1979.
On September 15, Aiden Saari reported a White-eyed Vireo in the woods beyond the airport at Park Point. Then this past Sunday, September 21, while I was leading my annual bird walk on Park Point in celebration of Hawk Ridge Weekend and our group wended our way to the Sky Harbor Airport entrance, we ran into Aiden and some other birders who’d all been seeing that selfsame White-eyed Vireo. It was a fairly long hike when our bird walk was supposed to already be over, but several participants and I made it to the spot where people had seen it. We studied every bit of vegetation searching for this elusive skulker.
I am 96 percent certain I saw it fly past. White-eyed Vireos have yellowish flanks, and at least according to the Sibley field guide, quite a bit of yellow on the underside of the wings—significantly more than on the yellow-flanked Blue-headed Vireo. The bird I saw fly across before I lost it in the vegetation seemed the right size and had yellow in the right place, plus I first picked it up where people had lost view of it several minutes before. But no one else saw what I was looking at, and I didn’t see any other field marks beyond the size and yellow on the flank and underwing, so my sighting had no confirmation. I stuck around for an hour but didn’t find it again. Several other people did see it later Sunday, but I wasn’t among them, so I’ll remember this White-eyed Vireo as “the one that got away.”
We had a power outage on September 23 and I wasn’t getting notifications of bird postings on my phone, but just before 5 in the afternoon, my friend Bruce Munson called me about a Vermilion Flycatcher that he was looking at on Park Point—it had been around for a few hours. That stunningly beautiful wanderer from Mexico and South America barely makes it into the United States in Texas and the Southwest—I’ve seen it in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas as well as Mexico, Peru, and Guyana. There have been a handful of records in Minnesota, including one at Park Point in October 1991, but I happened to be out of town at the time. I badly wanted to see this one, so I hopped in my car and headed over.
A small group of people was already there—some had seen it and some hadn’t—when someone spotted it at the very top of a tree. I was standing in the wrong spot so I had to find a better vantage point, and the moment I got a glimpse, it dropped down behind vegetation. But I did get enough of a look to see its shape atop the tree and its vivid color as it dropped, and this time others saw the exact same bird well enough to confirm, so I’m counting it. I really wanted a photo, so I stuck around for an hour longer, but no luck.
Oh, well—there were lots of little songbirds flitting about and I did get a splendid if brief look at a Philadelphia Vireo. As Forrest Gump didn’t quite say, “Birdwatching is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get; you might miss that wonderful cherry truffle you were craving, or you might get a tiny dollop of the cherry juice sticking to a coconut one, but you’re certain to find something sweet.”
Laura’s words always enrich my day.