Don’t listen to the person who has the answers; listen to the person who has the questions.
~Albert Einstein
(from Ornitherapy, by Holly Merker et al)
August 27, 2022
Barefoot, still in pajamas, I don’t last a minute on my porch before dashing back inside for slippers and a fleece. I snatch the yoga blanket from the couch for good measure on my way back out. The commotion alerts my daughter, who follows me onto the south-facing side of our porch, which was toasty this time of day in mid-July. Together we sit on the cold decking, our eyes raised towards the canopy of mixed maple, ash, oak. My binoculars are at the ready. By now, my daughter knows what I’m looking for.
“What’s that, over there?” she says,
“What? Where?” I say, my grip tightening on my binoculars. She points to the young ash tree.
“There! I see movement.”
My daughter is just eight but already a skilled birder. She knows better than to search the trees for birds this time of year. Birds are way too good at hiding behind leaves. First, she looks for clues.
I press my binoculars to my eyes, feel my heartbeat accelerating. What will it be? I’m hoping for a neotropical migrant. A fall warbler, or an indigo bunting.
When beginner birders ask me for tips, I often preach, “Get to know your common birds,” or “Bird any time of day, all year long.” And I mean it, because no one knows everything about anything and my favorite bird is—or ought to be—the one I’m looking at right now.
But right now I miss early sunrise, warm mornings on the porch in a tee shirt and shorts, iced coffee. Right now I am mourning the colorful warblers who decorate the boughs of my forest like ornaments, who serenade each other through breeding season in June and July, who sing to their hatchlings in August—passing their secret language onto the next generation.
By late August the birdsong has all but ceased, and most birds are molting into muted, barely recognizable versions of their brilliant spring plumages before departing for the winter.
“You see it?” my daughter says.
“Ye-e-e-s,” I say, squinting into my binos to spot her bird, and then, I feel my shoulders sag, my heartbeat slow. “Oh, it’s just a red-eyed vireo,” I say before I can think better of it.
“Hmph!” She says, then gives me the stink eye before turning on her heel to retreat. “JUST a vireo?” she says indignantly before slamming the door behind her.
She’s right to be mad. But I know the red-eyed vireo. I mean I really, really know that bird. If you live on a half-acre or so of mixed forest, as many Vermonters do, you know this bird, too. The red-eyed vireo is one of the first spring migrants to arrive and one of the last to leave in the fall. He’s not a skulker, but rather, an acrobat—tumbling from forest canopy to brush, foraging for insects, singing incessantly from dawn to dusk in a cadence that sounds something like: “Here I am, in the tree, look at me, where are you?” He sings some ten thousand times a day (yes, someone actually counted), earning him the nickname “preacher bird.”
He’s hard to miss.
Watching my red-eyed vireo neighbor—one of three I’ve observed all summer—I’m bored but loathe to admit it, and equally stubborn to admit that my daughter is right. So I try to push through my boredom, I sit and watch the vireo flip and tumble, weave in and out of the baby-ash leaves. In my head I chant, "every bird is special" until ten minutes pass without any sign of the more charismatic birds I had been hoping for. At least I’m getting good binocular practice, I think.
But this vireo is more colorful than I remember. Was his cap ever that blue? And his iris—it’s not red but black, or maybe, dark brown? Could it be that this isn’t my frequent visitor but a juvenile? His chick, perhaps? Could this one be a female? Do red-eyed vireos have sexual dimorphism—do the males and females look different? Could this chick have hatched in the canopy right above this baby-ash tree? What do red-eyed vireo eggs look like? What do their nests look like? I’ll have to look for this one’s nest once the leaves have fallen. Where does this bird overwinter?
OK, so I didn’t really know as much as I thought I had about the red-eyed vireo, but just as watching her begins to flood me with questions, she takes flight, and another bird lands in her place.
It’s another neotropical migrant, but this time, a charismatic, secretive bird of the high forest canopy. A bird I’ve only seen once before in our interior forest—high in a maple bough, singing his throaty song to shoo me, an intruder, from his territory.
No longer scarlet, yet no less striking, he has donned his yellow winter plumage, though his jet-black wings remain.
Don’t scarlet tanagers prefer oaks and maples? What is he doing in this scrubby baby-ash? Has the vireo led him to the good fall eats? Why has he displaced the vireo? Is the tanager dominant? Or is there any symbiosis to their relationship?
My charismatic bird had appeared—but only after a usual suspect held my attention long enough to let me see him.
Finally, both birds had flown, but questions—mostly about the vireo—continued to pour in. And I was in no particular rush to answer them. My daughter--much wiser than I--had reminded me how to bird with beginner’s mind. That learning doesn’t stop once we’ve checked a bird off on a list. That to know is finite, but to wonder is infinite.