Scarlet Tanager

A male Scarlet Tanager takes a drink at the Lukes’ birdbath.

Both Charlotte and I would agree that it would take nearly the strength of a team of huge strong draft horses to pull us away from our home when the warblers, Scarlet Tanagers, Towhees, Indigo Buntings and other brilliantly colored songbirds are resting during migration, feeding and getting water in our front yard. In this year’s early- to mid-May period, the Tanagers have given us more enjoyment than in many past years.

We put navel oranges on special feeders with the cut side up for the Baltimore Orioles. They enjoy eating the pulp but so do the Scarlet Tanagers. Once most of the pulp has been removed Charlotte puts a spoonful of grape jelly inside the oranges. At first the Tanagers would only go to the orange pulp, but once they got used to seeing the jelly and tried it, they were hooked. Now we have to refill the jelly several times a day to keep them happy.

In the first few days we had three brilliant male tanagers and just one female. Now there are two females at the feeders. Soon they will be building nests and we will not see them as often, but these glorious days in May are cherished for the brief time these birds gather in numbers.

James Russell Lowell, a great poet who was sensitive to and closely in touch with nature, wrote, “Thy duty, winged flame of spring, is but to love, fly and sing.” There is no other songbird in the eastern states and the Midwest that he could have been describing other than the male Scarlet Tanager. In fact, the beautiful male Cardinal that also comes to our feeders pales in comparison.

So brilliant is the Tanager’s red color that one wonders if there are the proper pigments available to the artist to accurately depict this dazzling creature. One might describe its red as a super-saturated color, as though it possessed an inner electrical force to make it glow and shimmer.

The female is dull greenish above, yellowish below, with dark brownish or blackish wings. The adult male’s flaming scarlet is also set off by its jet-black wings and tail. Occasionally you hear someone describe it as the black-winged redbird. During late summer and early fall, the male shows splotchy green and red as he molts to his yellow-green winter plumage, although he does retain his black wing and tail color. The female keeps her same colors year round.

There have been several times during the past week or more when we’ve had two different male Scarlet Tanagers and one female Tanager simultaneously feeding on sunflower seeds at our platform feeders, along with the oranges and grape jelly. Occasionally we see an immature male as indicated by his brownish secondary and primary wing feathers and also some faint yellowish mixed in with the red feathers.

The first male Scarlet Tanager arrived at our feeders this year on May 10, an average arrival date at this latitude. Previous records indicate that the main movement of these birds through northeastern Wisconsin occurs between May 15 and May 30. Arrivals anywhere in the state before the end of April are rare.

Two of the four groups of Wildflower Pilgrimage people we hiked with a few years ago in a large mixed hardwoods were treated with exceptionally good close looks at a male Scarlet Tanager as it fed very quietly with a minimum of movement. In fact, the bird appeared to be almost sluggish at times, perfectly content to “show off” for our group of 20 hikers, all who quite ecstatically marveled at its awesome beauty. The bird left us with the feeling that he was fully as enchanted in us as we were in him.

These birds eat primarily insects during the breeding season. Their diet may include caterpillars, moths, bees, wasps and beetles that are located mostly in the mid-canopy. Occasionally the bird will sally into the air for insects that are on the wing.

Come late summer and fall, their diet includes many berries and other fruits, very likely important for fat deposition for the long fall migration to the base of the Andes Mountains and western Amazonia, from Panama to northwestern Bolivia. The bird is said to be infrequently observed and poorly known in its winter range.

Due to the Tanager’s general location in the leafy canopy of trees during nesting time, and also because of its slow and deliberate movements, it is the bird’s song or call notes that will reveal its position. Its somewhat raspy and blurry “sore-throated Robin” song has been described as “zureet, zeeyer, zeero, zeery,” while its call note sounds like “CHIP-gurr, or CHICK-kurr.”

This female Scarlet Tanager rests between feedings of orange pulp and grape jelly.

Tanagers prefer the higher and denser forest canopy for nesting in woods having a larger variety of tree species, a smaller percent of ground cover and a higher density of nine- to 12-inch diameter trees. Its nest tree will be deciduous, mostly oak or sometimes Sugar Maple in our region and the nest will often be 20 to 30 feet above the ground and placed on a horizontal branch within a cluster of leaves usually about halfway out from the trunk.

If you go into the woods and hear the songs of the Wood Thrush, Eastern Weed-pewee, Great-crested Flycatcher, Red-eyed Vireo, Ovenbird, Rose-breasted Grosbeak and Indigo Bunting, then there is an excellent possibility of the Scarlet Tanager also nesting in that environment. You very likely will be enjoying a pristine, large wooded tract of more than 50 acres that has not been fragmented or “checker-boarded” by roads and development, activity that nearly always will discourage the Tanager and its other high-priority fellow birds from nesting there.

The best strategies to maintain populations of Scarlet Tanagers are to protect large existing forests and to promote the establishment of forested corridors to reconnect isolated forest patches.

Welcome these “flames of spring” to your woods and do everything in your power to maintain the nesting and feeding conditions these star performers require for living their lives.