318 LOUISIANA TANAGER. 



Pacific Ocean. They are entitled to a distinguished place in 

 the pages of American Ornithology, both as being, till now, 

 altogether unknown to naturalists, and as natives of what is 

 or at least will be, and that at no distant period, part of the 

 western territory of the United States. 



The frail remains of the bird now under consideration, as 

 well as of the other two, have been set up by Mr Peale in 

 his museum, with as much neatness as the state of the skins 

 would permit. Of three of these, which were put into my 

 hands for examination, the most perfect was selected for the 

 drawing. Its size and markings were as follows : — Length, 

 six inches and a half ; back, tail, and wings, black ; the 

 greater wing-coverts, tipt with yellow ; the next superior row, 

 wholly yellow ; neck, rump, tail-coverts, and the whole lower 

 parts, greenish yellow; forepart of the head, to and beyond 

 the eyes, light scarlet ; bill, yellowish horn colour ; edges of 

 the upper mandible, ragged, as in the rest of its tribe ; legs, 

 light blue ; tail, slightly forked, and edged with dull whitish ; 

 the whole figure about the size, and much resembling in 

 shape, the scarlet tanager (Plate XI. fig. 3), but evidently 

 a different species, from the black back and yellow coverts. 

 Some of the feathers on the upper part of the back were also 

 skirted with yellow. A skin of what I supposed to be the 

 female, or a young bird, differed in having the wings and 

 back brownish, and in being rather less. 



The family or genus to which this bird belongs is parti- 

 cularly subject to changes of colour, both progressively, during 

 the first and second seasons, and also periodically after- 

 wards. Some of those that inhabit Pennsylvania change 

 from an olive green to a greenish yellow, and lastly to a 

 brilliant scarlet ; and, I confess, when the preserved specimen 

 of the present species was first shown me, I suspected it to 

 have been passing through a similar change at the time it 

 was taken. But having examined two more skins of the 

 same species, and finding them all marked very nearly alike, 

 which is seldom the case with those birds that change while 



