WILD THINGS: CHASING A TINY VENTRILOQUIST

I wasn’t going to go chasing after the yellow-green vireo that appeared at Dagny Johnson State Park in Key Largo late last week. For one, I didn’t expect it to stick around. I’d known of two sightings in the Lower Keys and they were both short looks at birds that disappeared in minutes, never to be re-found. No one even got any photos.

I don’t really like chasing rarities. Seeing them, sure. But ditching everything else in your life to drive a long distance seeking a bird you may or may not see doesn’t hold a lot of charm for me. Also, you tend to have to get up unreasonably early. Also, the Fourth of July weekend traffic would no doubt be evocative of the fifth, and possibly the ninth, circle of hell.

When Kevin Christman asked if I wanted to go chase the yellow-green vireo on Saturday, I said, maybe, if I managed to get up in time. Which I thought was a polite way of saying no. And then, weirdly enough, I was awake at 6:30 a.m. Saturday, so I texted Kevin. I think nostalgia partly got me going, which is odd for a bird you’ve never seen.

The first sighting in the Lower Keys was by the sharp-eyed Brennan Mulrooney in 2002. The second was by the bird whisperer Carl Goodrich and the exquisitely cranky Murray Gardler in 2008. I used to bird pretty regularly with all three of them, but Brennan moved out to California a while back, Murray passed away a few years ago, and Carl sold his place in Key West when his wife couldn’t travel from Cape Cod any more. Honestly, any time I bird around Fort Zach or Indigenous Park and don’t see any of them, I still feel disappointed.

Chasing after a rarity that they’d all seen and I hadn’t wouldn’t be the same as birding with them, but maybe it would feel somewhat adjacent.

The first yellow-green vireo recorded in North America was seen in Quebec, of all places, in the spring of 1883. (North America, for the purposes of ornithology and birdwatching in general, is defined as everything north of the Mexican border.)

Yellow-green vireos are a Central American species, breeding from Mexico down through the southern end of Panama. In winter the entire species migrates to South America.

The working theory on the Quebec bird was that it was moving with a flock of closely-related red-eyed vireos, who also winter in South America, but breed all over North America, as far up as the Northwest Territories, and when the red-eyes started heading north, the yellow-green got a little excited and traveled along with them.

The next yellow-green vireo recorded in North America was seen in California in 1887.

And then nothing. Until 1958, when one showed up in Pensacola. The bird was described as being perched in a live oak, alternately singing and eating caterpillars. The observers did what a lot of people who found rare birds did at the time – they shot it.

It is not as dastardly an act as it sounds. At the time, it was the only real way to prove such a rarity had been seen. And the stuffed skin was sent off to a university’s collection to further the study of ornithology. Better optics, relatively affordable cameras, and changing social mores have made such practices far less common.

What does give me pause is the observer/collectors also saw a second yellow-green vireo, which wasn’t singing, probably a female. So there was a chance that two birds out of their normal range could have bred. Which is how range expansion happens and, at its most baseline, how new species come to be (though speciation tends to take a couple eons).

Yellow-green vireos have become more common in North America since then. They sneak across the border into Arizona and sometimes New Mexico and California, and they now breed pretty regularly in the southernmost parts of Texas.

I found a baker’s dozen records of them in Florida on eBird.

Dagny Johnson Park can be buggy, but the mosquitoes were strangely absent when we got there. At the entrance arch we ran into a couple birders who were leaving and asked if they’d seen the vireo. They said yes, told us where to look, and said you had to be a little patient. Then one of them recognized me from Key West and asked if I knew how Carl Goodrich was doing. I said he’d fallen a couple weeks ago and banged up his face pretty good, but reports were he was on the mend.

Further in the park, we heard the vireo pretty quickly. It was high up in a mahogany tree, singing loud. The folks at Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology rather uncharitably describe the yellow- green’s two-note song as monotonous and “like a house sparrow that’s taken singing lessons.”

I thought the bird could have enunciated better, but there was a force to it, a solidity in the notes. What was simultaneously amazing and frustrating, though, was the way the bird could throw his voice. We stared into that tree for five, 10, 20 minutes while it sang its heart out, and we could not find it. The song would sound like it was coming from different parts of the tree, but if the bird was moving around we would have seen it. For a while I was almost convinced it was two birds.

There are birders who will consider a bird a lifer if they’ve heard but not seen it. I’ve never been one of those people, but as the crick in my neck built from staring up, I was considering it.

Then Kevin said, “I can see his butt.” 

“It pooped,” he added.

There were layers and layers of leaves to get through, but finally I lined up the gaps between them the right way and saw what Kevin was seeing, something similar to what Brennan and Carl and Murray had seen all those years ago. It was high in the upper right quadrant of the tree. Its butt was toward us, but occasionally he would move his head and give us a profile. He was a pale little thing, half a cigar in length, whitish and brownish mostly, but tinged on the sides with a lemon meringue hue that blended with the green of the leaves.

We stayed there for a couple hours, losing the bird and re-finding it several times, the bird singing most of the time, but rarely giving itself away.

Mark Hedden is a photographer, writer, and semi-professional birdwatcher. He has lived in Key West for more than 25 years and may no longer be employable in the real world. He is also executive director of the Florida Keys Audubon Society.