A Red Tan age}.



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A RED TANAGER (Pyranga rubra).


By Katharine Currey.


I kept a Red Tanager for several years, and should have

had him longer, as he was in perfect health, had he not played

the truant, opening his cage-door and flying away to a neigh¬

bouring garden, where he was drowned in a watering-pot.


His successor, “Tanny II.” was very tame and most in¬

telligent. He sang a few bars of a sweet song and, like his

predecessor, made himself quite happy and very much at home

in a good-sized double cage that stood in a south window which

was always open, so that he was in the air all day long. He

bathed perpetually and, curiously enough, was very shy of alight¬

ing on the ground. If I put any tit-bit into his cage he would

crane his neck and try to reach it from a perch and, failing this,

he would pounce on it, hurriedly returning to his perch.


“ Tanny ” was very quick and clever and always greeted

me, if I had been away, flying about his cage, calling loudly,

with many manifestations of joy. He was very jealous if I

attended to the other cages in the morning before liis and scolded

me well. If he needed clean water he took his drinking glass in

liis beak and shook it. Others of my birds have done the same.

Of course he soon 'learned where the mealworms were kept, and

if anyone went anywhere near the little cask they were in he

peeped round the corner of his cage and screamed, spreading out

his glossy black tail and flirting it from side to side. I tried to

make him spend the summer in an aviary, but nothing would

induce him to leave his cage ; if he came out into the room for a

flight he hastened back to it. One corner w r as covered in over a

perch and there he loosted. His rich crimson colour, especially

bright on his head and neck, never lost its brilliancy. Well does

he deserve his name—the ‘ Red Bird of America.’


I fed him on egg-food, fruit and ants’ eggs, with as many

insects and grubs as I could get. Mealworms he slowly chewed

into little bits in his beak—a most unpleasant proceeding. Flies

and earwigs were a great delicacy.


He died of old age, gradually losing consciousness till he

ceased to breathe. “Tanny” had a sweet disposition and loved

his home and human friends. Such bird-friends leave a gap

when they go and a bright memory behind them.



