SHRIKES, WAX WINGS, SWALLOWS, AND TANAGERS. 131 



THE TANAGERS. 



The family of tanagers (Tanagridce), which in tropical 

 America contains many brilliant and beautiful species, has 

 several representatives in the United States, only two of 

 which commonly inhabit the eastern region. All are brightly 

 colored birds, with a stout bill, notched at the tip and having 

 a tooth or lobe near the middle. They are migratory in 

 habits and subsist upon both insects and fruit. 



The Scarlet Tanager is the most strikingly colored of any 

 of our birds. The male is of a brilliant scarlet, with deep- 

 black wings and tail ; the female is olive-green above, green- 

 ish yellow below, with wings and tail more or less dusky. 

 This bird is common throughout the Eastern States, ranging 

 westward a little beyond the Mississippi. It nests in trees in 

 woods and groves, and winters in the South. Its food 

 consists mostly of insects, of which it takes a varied assort- 

 ment. The stomachs of various specimens have been found 

 to contain ants, ichneumon-flies, including what was thought 

 to be the large Thakssa lunator, many caterpillars, crane-flies 

 and other Diptera, curculios, click-beetles, leaf-chafers, and 

 various other beetles, grasshoppers, a few bugs, an occasional 

 dragon-fly or spider, and several harvest-spiders. A single 

 Nebraska specimen shot in the autumn of 1874 contained 

 thirty-seven locusts. Three nestlings less than a week old, 

 examined by Professor King, had eaten four caterpillars, one 

 fly, one small grasshopper, one bug, besides undetermined 

 fragments. 



The feeding habits of the Rose Tanager, or Summer Red- 

 Bird, seem to be less known than those of the last-named 

 species. One specimen taken in Maryland had eaten wild 

 blackberries, a bee, and a wasp. Mr. Robert Ridgway says 

 that its food consists to a great extent of hornets, wasps, and 

 bees, because of which it is sometimes called "red bee-bird. 1 ' 

 It is more southerly in distribution than the scarlet tanager. 



