78 



BIRDS UF AMERICA 



WESTERN TANAGER 

 Piranga ludoviciana ( Wilson) 



A. O. U. Number 607 



Other Name. — Louisiana Tanager. 



General Description. — Length, yl4 inches. Male, 

 yellow, black, and red ; female, olive-greenish, yellow, 

 and dusky. Bill, stout; wings, moderately long and 

 pointed ; tail, shorter than wing, notched. 



Color. — .Adult Male in Summer: Back, shoulders, 

 wings, and tail, black ; back sometimes slightly mi.xed 

 with yellow ; posterior row of lesser wing-coverts, 

 middle coverts, broad tips to outer webs of greater 

 coverts, rump, upper tail-cover's, hindneck, and under 

 parts of body, ye'low. the tips to greater wing-coverts, 

 usually paler yellow, sometimes whitish, and the hind- 

 neck, sometimes tinged with red ; head, crimson, paler 

 on throat ; under wing-coverts, light yellow ; bill, dull 

 wax-yellowish; iris, brown. Adult Male in Winter; 

 Similar to the summer male but with head yellow (or 

 but slightly tinged with red), obscured on back of head 

 and hindneck with olive-greenish or dusky tips to the 

 feathers; feathers of back, usually margined with yel- 

 lowish-olive ; inner wing quills and the tail feathers 

 margined terminally with white or pale yellow. Adult 

 Female: Above, olive-greenish, the back and shoulders 



tinged with gray, the rump and upper tail-coverts more 

 yellowish ; wings, grayish dusky with liglit olive-green- 

 ish edgings; middle coverts broadly tipped with light 

 yellow and outer webs of greater coverts, broadly tipped 

 with paler yellow or white, forming two distinct bands; 

 tail, grayish-brown with yellowish olive-green edgings ; 

 under parts dull yellowish, the under tail-coverts, clear 

 canary-yellow ; anterior portion of head, sometimes 

 tinged with red ; bill and iris as in adult male. 



Nest and Eggs. — Nest: A flat saucer-shaped struc- 

 ture, generally low down on horizontal branch of a 

 conifer or oak, sometimes 30 feet up; constructed of 

 twigs, grass, and bark strips, lined with similar finer 

 material and horse-hair. Eggs: 3 or 4. pale bluish- 

 green, lightly spotted with browns and purple. 



Distribution. — Western North American, from east- 

 ern base of Rocky ^Mountains to Pacific coast, north- 

 ward to British Columbia, Athabasca, Idaho, Montana, 

 and southwestern South Dakota ; south in winter over 

 greater part of Mexico to highlands of Guatemala ; 

 straggling eastward during migration to more northern 

 -Atlantic States. 



The easterner, seeing for the first time the 

 wonders of the Pacific slope, hears in tlie decidu- 

 ous woods a voice from " back home." It is the 

 song of a Tanager ; but when followed to its 

 source the singer is seen to be not the Black- 

 winged Redbird of the east, but a western bird, 

 the most brilliant of them all. It is handsome 

 and striking in plumage and elegant in form. The 

 scarlet, yellow, and black of the male are colors 

 ordinarily associated with tropical birds and not 

 with the songsters of the north, but its lay seems 

 almost exactly that of the scarlet beauty of the 

 eastern woods. 



\Mien the territory of Louisiana, then an un- 

 known land, stretched from the Mississippi to 

 the Pacific, this, the most beauteous small bird 

 of that great region, was called the Louisiana 

 Tanager ; but the name is inappropriate now ; for 

 the bird is only a rare migrant in the Louisiana 

 of to-day. The name Western Tanager is well 

 chosen. 



This bird is common on the motintain sides of 

 the -Sierra Nevada in California, where it sings 

 from the tops of tall trees, also in the deciduous 

 woods in some of the river valleys of Oregon, 

 Washington, and British Columbia. It is a 

 forest bird and often builds its nest in firs or 



pines. It is a retiring species, although it can 

 hardly be called shy, and like the Scarlet Tan- 

 ager it sometimes ventures out of its forest 

 fastnesses into the nearby clearings. This Tan- 

 ager feeds its young chiefly on insects which it 

 is expert at catching both on trees and on the 

 wing. Edward Howe Forbush. 



The Western Tanager, like the Robin, occa- 

 sionally becomes a nuisance in the orchard. It 

 breeds in the mountainous regions of California 

 and northward, and as a rule is not common in 

 the fruit-growing sections. There are, however, 

 times during migration when it fairly swarms in 

 some of the fruit-raising regions, and unfortu- 

 nately this sometimes happens just at the time 

 when the cherry crop is ripening. The bird is 

 a late breeder and does not seem to care to get 

 to its nesting ground before the last of June or 

 early July. It is thus enabled to begin in the 

 southern part of the State when cherries are 

 ripening there, and leisurely follow the ripening 

 fruit northward. The Tanagers are in Cali- 

 fornia every year, and every year they migrate 

 to their nesting grounds in spring and return in 

 fall, but only at long intervals do they swarm in 

 prodigious numbers. Evidently the migration 



