Bird Song SW WA Willapa NWR - Hutton's Vireo ?

[okaugust]

3/6/2022 - Taken at the Willapa NWR's Reikkola Unit, Porter Point Loop Trail. The trail goes past the tidal mud flats at sea level, up 200 feet through old Sitka Spruce (I think) forest, then down old logging roads through some shorter, dense new fir areas, then down into a marshy deciduous area. I don't know my botany well enough to know what the old forests were replaced with, but in the new growth area I picked up these calls and songs. Merlin, which has been a huge help to me since moving from WY to OR late last summer, recorded it, but offered no suggestions for ID.

Oddly enough, sometimes it can pick up a Brown Creeper in a flock of noisy robins while the ocean is banging away over a berm and a tractor goes by, but standing almost still alone on the top of a hill with no wind or other noise, and nada on this one over several tries. I am recording it on my iPhone 6, so you might have set the volume to 11 to get it play loud enough.

I've gotten pretty good at Fox Sparrows, Song Sparrows, Pacific Wrens and Wrentits, and at first I thought these were Hutton's Vireo, but I've only heard those three times and seen once.

I could get eyes on one bird, I heard at least two, but it was about 20 feet up with the sun right behind it. The woods are dense enough that if it isn't on the main path, there is no way to get a visual lock on it. It flitted about like a kinglet or vireo, and was similar in size and coloring, but the song isn't one that sounds familiar for those species. But that may be my lack of experience with Pac NW versions of their songs.

Could even be two species? I have a call like sound that is a zeer, zeer (which to me is the Hutton's) on one hand, and almost robin like bleep bleep bleep on the other. Sorry for the zipper and rustling as I tried to move closer. The zipper sounds really loud!

Thank you! Mostly I'm trying to lock down my audio birding skills in a new place, and don't trust myself yet on birds that are really new to me.

 

 

[Connor Cochrane]

The audio files are giving me error messages. Could you maybe try uploading them again?

[meghann]

They work for me, but I am one of the worst birding my ear people ever, so take this with a grain of salt, but it does sound like the zeer sounds I hear on xeno-canto

[okaugust]

Thank you. My laptop crashed yesterday morning so I have a new one on the way and the old one trying to be salvaged at a local shop. Hopefully I can get back up and running this week to try to add the files again so others can hear them too. 

[Aidan B]

I can hear them. The zeer calls are certainly Hutton's, and the bleep call sounds good for Hutton's to me as well. the have a lot of different calls but the same call repeating over and over in a pattern is pretty distinctive. 

[okaugust]

Great, thank you!

I have a new lap top, but all of my documents, photos and files are down at the shop hoping for retrieval and hopefully a cut over. Thankfully I save the best stuff to a photo hosting site and at least have an older external drive from my last crash to grab files from (hopefully) but losing over a decade of all docs and photos will be a heart breaker if the magic doesn't happen.

In the grand scheme of things, right now it makes me immensely happy that a couple of you got the files to work. 🙂

Thank you!