(_Vireo noveboracensis_) Vireo or Greenlet family
_Length_--5 to 5.3 inches. An inch shorter than the English
sparrow.
_Male and Female_--Upper parts bright olive-green, washed with
grayish. Throat and underneath white; the breast and sides
greenish yellow; wings have two distinct bars of yellowish
white. Yellow line from beak to and around the eye, which has
a white iris. Feathers of wings and tail brownish and edged
with yellow.
_Range_--United States to the Rockies, and to the Gulf regions
and beyond in winter.
_Migrations_--May. September. Summer resident.
"Pertest of songsters," the white-eyed vireo makes whatever
neighborhood it enters lively at once. Taking up a residence in the
tangled shrubbery or thickety undergrowth, it immediately begins to
scold like a crotchety old wren. It becomes irritated over the merest
trifles--a passing bumblebee, a visit from another bird to its tangle,
an unsuccessful peck at a gnat--anything seems calculated to rouse its
wrath and set every feather on its little body a-trembling, while it
sharply snaps out what might perhaps be freely constructed into
"cuss-words."
And yet the inscrutable mystery is that this virago meekly permits the
lazy cowbird to deposit an egg in its nest, and will patiently sit
upon it, though it is as large as three of her own tiny eggs; and when
the little interloper comes out from his shell the mother-bird will
continue to give it the most devoted care long after it has shoved her
poor little starved babies out of the nest to meet an untimely death
in the smilax thicket below.
An unusual variety of expression distinguishes this bird's voice from
the songs of the other vireos, which are apt to be monotonous, as they
are incessant. If you are so fortunate to approach the white-eyed
vireo before he suspects your presence, you may hear him amusing
himself by jumbling together snatches of the songs of the other birds
in a sort of potpourri; or perhaps he will be scolding or arguing with
an imaginary foe, then dropping his voice and talking confidentially
to himself. Suddenly he bursts into a charming, simple little song, as
if the introspection had given him reason for real joy. All these
vocal accomplishments suggest the chat at once; but the minute your
intrusion is discovered the sharp scolding, that is fairly screamed at
you from an enraged little throat, leaves no possible shadow of a
doubt as to the bird you have disturbed. It has the most emphatic call
and song to be heard in the woods; it snaps its words off very short.
"_Chick-a-rer chick_" is its usual call-note, jerked out with great
spitefulness.
Wilson thus describes the jealously guarded nest: "This bird builds a
very neat little nest, often in the figure of an inverted cone; it is
suspended by the upper end of the two sides, on the circular bend of a
prickly vine, a species of smilax, that generally grows in low
thickets. Outwardly it is constructed of various light materials, bits
of rotten wood, fibres of dry stalks, of weeds, pieces of paper
(commonly newspapers, an article almost always found about its nest,
so that some of my friends have given it the name of the politician);
all these materials are interwoven with the silk of the caterpillars,
and the inside is lined with fine, dry grass and hair."