Congestion in WSN increases the energy dissipation rates of sensor nodes as well as the loss of packets and thereby hinders fair and reliable event detection. We find that one of the key reasons of congestion in WSN is allowing sensing nodes to transfer as many packets as possible. This is due to the use of CSMA/CA that gives opportunistic medium access control. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient congestion avoidance protocol that includes source count based hierarchical and load adaptive medium access control and weighted round robin packet forwarding. We also propose in-node fair packet scheduling to achieve fair event detection. The results of simulation show our scheme exhibits more than 90% delivery ratio even under bursty traffic condition which is good enough for reliable event perception.