Red-eyed Vireo - Ecology

Ecology

The breeding habitat is open wooded areas across Canada and the eastern and northwestern United States. These birds migrate to South America, where they spend the winter. The Latin American population occur in virtually any wooded habitat in their range. Most of these are residents, but the populations breeding in the far southern part of this species' range (e.g. most of its range in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia) migrate north as far as Central America.

This vireo is one of the more frequent American passerine vagrants to western Europe, with more than one hundred records, mainly in Ireland and Great Britain. In northern Ohio, it seems to return to breed at about the same time as one century ago; but it may leave for winter quarters one or two weeks earlier at present than it did in the past.

Red-eyed Vireos glean insects from tree foliage, favouring caterpillars and aphids and sometimes hovering while foraging. In some tropical regions, they are commonly seen to attend mixed-species feeding flocks, moving through the forest higher up in the trees than the bulk of such flocks.

They also eat berries, especially before migration, and in the winter quarters, where trees bearing popular fruit like Tamanqueiro (Alchornea glandulosa) or Gumbo-limbo (Bursera simaruba) will even attract them to parks and gardens. Fruit are typically not picked up from a hover, but the birds often quite acrobatically reach for them, even hanging upside down.

The nest is a cup in a fork of a tree branch. The Red-eyed Vireo suffers from nest parasitism by the Brown-headed Cowbird (Molothrus ater) in the north of its range, and by the Shiny Cowbird (M. bonariensis) further south. Parasitism by Haemoproteus and trypanosomans might affect these birds not infrequently, as was noted in studies of birds caught in Parque Nacional de La Macarena and near Turbo (Colombia): though only three Red-eyed Vireos were examined, all were infected with at least one of these parasites.