Red-eyed Vireo

Erika and I photographed this Red-eyed Vireo on 30 August 2018. By the last week of August, and often even earlier, fall migrants are on the move. This bird accompanied about a dozen warblers in Carleton College’s arboretum. Elsewhere in this blog, I have wrtten why this vireo was once called Preacher Bird, and I have explained that first year birds lack the red eyes of adults.

Ornithologists have puzzled over how vireos are related to other birds. At one time or another, they have been placed near warblers or shrikes. Recent DNA research suggests that, like shrikes, they are distantly related to crows. Within this assemblage of birds, however, vireos are relatively distant from present-day crows and shrikes, originating, instead, from the most primitive of crow ancestors. The crow assemblage evolved in Australia or Southeast Asia. Now Vireos are only found in the New World. Recent research, however, concludes that a couple of Asian birds are, in fact, vireos (Brewer et al. 2018).