The Scarlet Tanager

This male shows a hint of yellow feathers near his black wing. Photo by Roy Lukes.

In March of 1996 Charlotte and I took a long-awaited vacation to the Desert Southwest to visit her parents in Phoenix and also to stay for several days with our good nature friends Linda and Dan Dilts in Tucson. One of our main goals was to see some of the more uncommon birds of that region. Fortunately Dan and Linda knew the area well and took us to visit the Patagonia-Sonoita Creek Preserve about 40 Miles southeast of Tucson. This area of unusually high biodiversity was the first preservation project undertaken by The Nature Conservancy in Arizona in 1966.

One can observe up to 300 species of birds there throughout the year while hiking the two and a half miles of dirt trails. Imagine species such as the Vermilion Flycatcher, Yellow Chat, Bell’s Vireo, Broad-billed Hummingbird and the Elf Owl being listed as common birds to be seen! What a superb and memorable birding day we experienced. Seeing the first brilliant little Vermilion Flycatcher was truly breathtaking. By the time we had hiked a mile or so we’d catch sight of another bird and end up saying, “Oh, just another Vermillion Flycatcher!” They were downright abundant.

Fast-forward from that “Vermilion” outing 15 years ago to our present-day home in the middle of a mixed hardwoods in north-central Door County. It’s mid-June and a flurry of nesting birds attracted to our front yard for food and water has added a scintillating combination of colors, kaleidoscopic in effect, that include mainly black, orange, red, blue, yellow and green. The primary performers are the male Baltimore Orioles, Scarlet Tanagers, Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, Cardinals, Indigo Buntings, American Goldfinches, Gray Catbirds and their mates.

Our “alpha male” Scarlet Tanager and his mate along with a male Indigo Bunting. Photo by Roy Lukes.

Just as the Vermilion Flycatchers turned our heads in the Dessert Southwest, no bird here turns people’s heads so dramatically and brings forth as many explanatory remarks as does the male Scarlet Tanager. 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 is loved and admired by so many people 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 possessed of an inner electrical force to make it glow and shimmer.

Tanagers, among most of our nesting songbirds, love to bathe. Often, while observing the male’s vigorous splashing technique, we have noticed some of its intense inner pale yellow-gold feathers show through its brilliant outer red coat. It’s this quality that has enabled us to accurately identify three males coming daily to bathe and especially to eat the flesh of oranges and grape jelly. The most awesome of the three, which we call the “alpha male,” also has a small patch of red feathers near the wrist bend of each of his black wings. The least colorful of the three has a considerable amount of yellow on his rear underside, and when he bathes, quite a bit of yellow shows though his wetted red feathers.

The female is dull greenish above, yellowish below, with dark brownish or blackish wings and tail. Its jet-black wings and tail set off the adult male’s flaming scarlet. 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 gradually molts to his yellow-green winter plumage, although he does retain his black wing and tail color. The female remains the same color year-round.

Tanagers 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 of deciduous trees. Occasionally the birds will sally into the air for insects that are on the wing.

A female Scarlet Tanager shows her green and yellowish colors in the back view. Photo by Roy Lukes.

Come late summer and fall, their diet includes many berries and other wild fruits, very likely important for fat deposition for the long fall migration that will take them primarily to the base of the Andes Mountains, 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 frequent 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. It’s somewhat raspy and blurry “sore-throated Robin” song has been described as “zureet, zeeyer, zero, zeery,” while its call note sounds like “CHIP -gurr, CHIP-churr or CHICK-kurr.”

If you go into a woods and hear the songs of the Wood Thrush, Eastern Wood-Pewee, Great-crested Flycatcher, Red-eyed Vireo, Ovenbird, Rose-breasted Grosbeak and Indigo Bunting, then there is an excellent possibility that the Scarlet Tanager is also nesting in that environment.

You likely will be enjoying a pristine, large wooded tract of over 50 acres that has not been fragmented or checker-boarded by roads and development, activity that nearly always discourages the Tanagers and other high-priority birds from nesting there. The best strategies to maintain populations of Scarlet Tanagers are to protect large existing forests and promote the planting and establishment of forested corridors to reconnect isolated forest patches.

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