vireo swainsoni
Viento State Park, Oregon
Tuesday, May 6, 2008 — 4:50 pm
The Warbling Vireo has just been officially split into Eastern and Western species, netting me another lifer. According to my eBird records, I saw my first Western one in 2008 on a work trip to Portland. My sister and I went out a couple days early to sightsee. On the first day, we drove along the Columbia River, stopping at three or four places to look around and bird. I remember the Viento State Park— just a thin strip of vegetation between the highway and the river, but I don’t remember this particular bird because it was just a Warbling Vireo at the time, and I’d seen plenty of them in Illinois.
I do have a distinct memory of two Western Warbling Vireos I saw in Eleven Mile Canyon in Colorado on June 20, 2020. My wife and I had visited the canyon a short time earlier, and when I looked at the park list, I realized I was just a few birds away from having the largest list. I went back and spent a good chunk of a day looking for birds, and by the end of the day, I had the largest list (since surpassed—as of October, 2025, I’m in second place, five behind the leader). Anyway, maybe because the Western Warbling Vireo’s song is somewhat different than the Eastern song I’m more familiar with, I decided to find the actual bird and make sure it was a Warbling Vireo. It took me a long time. I circled around a small clump of Aspen, trying to triangulate and find the bird. I finally spotted it—actually sitting in its nest and singing. I didn’t know birds did that. Later in the day, about five miles away, I heard a second one. This time, with a better idea of what to look for, I found it much faster. It was also singing on its nest. I got photos of both birds.
When the new species was added to eBird, my records were automatically split. I’ve seen Western Warbling Vireos 43 times, most of them in Colorado while I lived there, but also a few in Arizona on my 2022 trip and one in Grant Teton National Park in 2024.