46 SOME CANADIAN BIRDS. 



SCARLET TANAGER. 



This is another of the beautiful birds of the world that Cana- 

 dians may claim as compatriots, for the brilliant tanager, whose 

 ancestors in some far distant time escaped from the thraldom of the 

 tropics, where such gorgecjus creatures naturally belong, is now 

 found in numbers in Southern Ontario, and occurs regularly, though 

 sparingly, as far north as the forty-seventh parallel. The male 

 tanager is a gleaming beauty. His body is covered with plumes of 

 bright, rich scarlet, while wings and tail are deep black. The 

 female wears plainer tints — the scarlet being replaced by dull olive 

 and the black by a dusky hue. The young are very like the female, 

 and in the autumn the male appears in a costume of the same colors. 



I kept one in a cage for a couple of years, and at his first moult 

 he lost the scarlet plumes he wore when captured, and never re- 

 gained them. In place of scarlet, he dressed in plain, dusky olive, 

 and his mam ers were as dull and uninteresting as his costume. 



This waif from the tropics is tropic-like in having an inferior 

 song. Tropical birds, as a rule, attractive as they are in brilliant 

 colored plumage, are not singers, just as tropical plants, with all 

 their wealth of color, have no perfume. 



The nest of this tanager is a loosely arranged affair, made of such 

 coarse stuff as twigs, shreds of bark and roots. It is placed on a 

 horizontal branch, often in an orchard, and some twenty feet or so 

 from the gn ,und. The eggs, usually four, are of a dull bluish, 

 ground color, and thickly marked, chiefly round the larger end, with 

 brown and lilac. The bird is about the same size as an oriole, 

 somewhat smaller than a robin, and like both oriole and robin in- 

 dulges in a mixed diet, though of the three the tanager is the most 

 inclined to the early fruits. 



