Looking for last year's white-eyed vireo nest is a winter treasure hunt, since we rarely find one in use. They are too well hidden. But, in this leafless month, someone often spots the teacup of plant fibers that a white-eyed vireo weaves in a twig fork at eye to knee level in a shrub within a few feet of an opening. Then the finder challenges other family members to make the discovery ,without giving any clues. Last year's nest nearest our door is only a hundred feet away, three feet high in a Mexican buckeye growing four feet from the path. We walked right by it many times last spring, unaware that it was full of life.

White-eyed vireos are part of forest reconstruction. They nest in shrubland and tree-fall or trailside openings, in contrast to red-eyed vireos that must have mature timber. Another local relative, the blackcapped vireo, requires short shrub clumps without trees -- an early stage of forest recovery. In the pegboard above my garage workbench I keep a few old white-eye nests, whose plant fibers are plucked by garage-perusing Carolina wrens for their own nests. And I protect a special memento, a black-capped vireo nest, the last local effort of this endangered species, as its habitat was being erased by suburban sprawl in 1970