Down here in Honduras, 'tis the season when young birds are everywhere. This is a recently fledged Plumbeous Vireo, one of the members of the Solitary Vireo complex that is resident here. Its parents look more like Cassin's Vireos than northern Plumbeous, but that is how they remain classified for now. With some genetics work, this Central American population may one day be elevated to species level.
On a short walk I encountered a couple of Plumbeous Vireo families, now more easily detected because of the constant begging calls that the fledglings produce.
these feathers were all grown at once, and thus – although new – are of poor quality
I photographed this bird a couple of days ago in the pine-oak forest of San Buenaventura, a small village 30 minutes south of Tegucigalpa, close to where we live. Also present there were recently fledged Eastern Bluebirds.
recently fledged Eastern Bluebird
This bird's dad was singing from the top of a tall, nearly dead pine tree. I recorded his song and posted it on Xeno-Canto:
Last week, Roselvy and I moved into our new house in Santa Ana, in the department of Francisco Morazan, Honduras, where we will be working with birds for an entire year. We already love it here, with lots of cool birds in the surrounding pine-oak forests.
One notable member of the bird community here is a Central American subspecies of Plumbeous Vireo.
Plumbeous Vireo became its own species in 1997, when the AOU split the Solitary Vireo into three species: Cassin's, Plumbeous and Blue-headed Vireo. All three are field-identifiable, with the most western Cassin's Vireo of California, Oregon, Washington and southern British Columbia more or less intermediate in appearance between the drab gray Plumbeous Vireo of the Intermountain West and the more colorful Blue-headed Vireo of the northeastern and boreal forest.
The Central American subspecies of the Plumbeous Vireo found in El Salvador and Honduras is actually more similar to Cassin's Vireo than it is to northern Plumbeous Vireo populations. Currently, the two subspecies recognized in Central America are notius (Belize) and montanus (El Salvador and Honduras), although these subspecies sometimes have been considered synonymous (Curson & Goguen 1998). Monroe (1968) considered the Honduran subspecies to be notius rather than montanus.
In this subspecies, the sides of the breast and belly are greenish (not gray), the secondaries have greenish edges (not gray), and there is a subtle contrast between the blueish gray head and the greenish gray back, unlike the all-gray head and back of the northern Plumbeous Vireo.
The vocalizations are different too. Here's some footage of a bird calling in response to my Ferruginous Pygmy-Owl imitation.
I also recorded some song. The same individual first sang a more or less continuous song, followed by a different song consisting of shorter, more hesitant phrases.
Cited literature
Curson, David R. and Christopher B. Goguen. 1998. Plumbeous Vireo (Vireoplumbeus),
The Birds of North America Online (A. Poole, Ed.). Ithaca: Cornell Lab
of Ornithology; Retrieved from the Birds of North America Online: http://bna.birds.cornell.edu/bna/species/366 Monroe, Jr., B. L.1968.A distributional survey of the birds of Honduras. Ornithol. Monogr. 7.
