Western Tanager
Piranga ludoviciana
This blog, that you will be reading over the next eight months, is about Tanagers. Tanagers are medium sized passerines or songbirds, that are very colorful. There are five species of tanagers in the U.S. and 197 species in Central and South America. These birds are extremely colorful. One tanager called the Golden-hooded Tanager is one of the most beautiful tanagers in the world. Imagine a bird with a blue face, a gold cap on its head, a solid black upper back, blueish greenish wings, and a turquoise rump-it’s all too much! Sadly enough, I’m not talking about that bird today. The bird I’m starting this blog out with is one that is not as elegant, iridescent, or colorful as some of the tanagers are, but it is the most beautiful tanager in the U.S. Most commonly found in the west, it is the Western Tanager.
This bird is mostly yellow, with black wings, one white wing bar, and a dark black tail. Males have a very red head in breeding plumage while females look pretty similar to males but are much duller in color. Females have some red around the bill and their back is not as deep black as the males. In winter, males and females turn an olive green color. The red on the males head goes away and his back turns a light black. Females get a really dull olive green color and lose all of the red around their bill, and their wings get an extremely light black. Western Tanagers grow to be around 7 3/4 in from beak to tail.
Western Tanagers song is a high pit-er-ick that is repeated four or five times. I have always thought that American Robins sound a lot like Western Tanagers, their call is a short rattle pit-it-it! Pit-it-it!
Their breeding range stretches from the southern Yukon Territory in Canada to the southwestern corner of the US, as far east as the great plains, and as far west as the ocean. On rare occasions they will be found here in the east, in Illinois, about once every two or three years. Western Tanagers breed in open coniferous and mixed deciduous woodlands, but they are most commonly found in Douglas Fir, Ponderosa Pine, and Lodgepole Pine. In riparian woodlands they are found in Aspens, Oak, Pinion, and Juniper forest. But those are just the most common locations for them. In breeding season or in summer, you can see them at almost any park, forest preserve, backyard or just about any location with a good number of trees and some protection. In fall and spring any habitat with shrubs, trees, and a good flock of birds, should have at least one Western Tanager, if not more!
Tanagers, like other passerines, eat mostly insects, fruit (berries), and in winter if they end up not migrating or just migrating the wrong direction, going east, they will probably eat bird seed. When feeding on insects, Western Tanagers do this thing called flycatching or hawking. That is when they sit on an exposed perch and sit motionless until a flying insect of some sort comes flying right by the birds face, then it darts from its perch and chases the insect. Once (if) it has caught it, the bird will fly back to the same perch that he started at and eat the insect. If the insect he caught was a wasp, he would hammer the wasp on the branch until it was dead, then he would remove the stinger and head from the body, and eat the rest of it for a snack.
Western Tanager nests are almost always built in the canopy of the forest. Females scope out the canopy part of the territory that the male chooses. Females do all of the nest building. Once the nest is built, the females will lay one clutch of three to five eggs. The eggs will hatch thirteen days later and until they are able to take their first flight, the adult tanagers have close to zero hours of rest with all of those mouths to feed! Luckily, it only lasts 10-15 days. After the young birds fledge, they look very similar to the female for the winter, after that there begins to be a change.
Luckily Western Tanagers don’t have many human caused threats, but there are feral cats. Feral cats kill an estimated 1.2 million birds a year in the U.S. If you have a cat, please keep it inside! By doing that, you save hundreds and possibly thousands of birds.
In the wild, Western Tanagers don’t have it easy because other birds and mammals eat them. Here is jus a short list of predators: Sharp-shinned Hawk, Cooper’s Hawk, Merlin, American Kestrel, Pine Martin, and weasels, just to name a few.
The Western Tanager population stands near a solid 11 million birds, with an increasing population of about 1.2 percent a year. Thirty-two percent of them breed in Canada and the other 68% breed in America.
Some places I recommend looking for these tanagers are in the Rocky Mountain National Park and the Grand Canyon National Park.
