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 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, afterwards. 
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 shewn 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 moulting, 
