General

White-eyed Vireo: Medium-sized, secretive vireo with olive-green upperparts, and white underparts with yellow sides and flanks. Spectacles are pale yellow and iris is white. Wings are dark with two white bars. Sexes are similar. Juvenile is duller and has dark iris.

Range and Habitat

White-eyed Vireo: Breeds from Nebraska to Massachusetts, south to eastern Mexico and throughout Florida. Winters from the southern Gulf Coast to Central America and from coastal North Carolina, the Bahamas, and Bermuda to the Caribbean. Found in dense thickets, cypress swamps, and scrubby edges of roads, and ponds. Avoids urban areas but may be found in wooded parks near large cities.

Breeding and Nesting

White-eyed Vireo: Three to five brown-and-black spotted, white eggs are laid in a deep cup of twigs, rootlets, bark strips, coarse grass, and leaves, and built in a dense thicket 1 to 8 feet above the ground. Incubation ranges from 12 to 16 days and is carried out by both parents.

Foraging and Feeding

White-eyed Vireo: Eats insects, spiders, and small lizards; also eats seeds and berries in fall and winter. Forages in shrubs or dense undergrowth

Vocalization

White-eyed Vireo: Song is an abrasive "quick-with the beer check." Call is a wren-like mewing note, a rasping rattle, and a sharp "tick."

Similar Species

White-eyed Vireo: Bell's Vireo has broken eye-ring, lacks yellow spectacles, usually shows fainter wing-bars, and has dark eye as an adult. Yellow-throated Vireo resembles White-eyed Vireo juvenile, but has white throat.