Get to Know the Western Tanager (Piranga ludoviciana)
By Patty Cheek
(Article originally published in the June 2021 Shorelines newsletter.)
What’s so special about a Western Tanager? Just about everything.
Three days ago, I saw two male tanagers and a female outside in my trees — Cornelian-cherry and pink dogwoods. Wow! The color is spectacular — the male is unmistakable with black on his back, scapular feathers, wings and tail with median coverts, rump and upper-tail coverts a bright yellow and a very reddish head. The female is duller, olive-green with some yellow on her undertail. She does have two yellowish-white wing bars like the males.
The tanagers are about seven and a quarter inches long and they winter from Mexico to Costa Rica. They come here in May and leave by late July or August migrating at night. Their habitat is open coniferous and mixed deciduous trees and forest openings like clearings and open wetlands. They are particularly inconspicuous despite their brilliant colors. They move deliberately and quietly through the trees, usually high up, around 30 to 50 feet. They like shade and you really must look for them if you want to see them.
They eat lots of insects, mostly wasps, ants, termites, stink-bugs, cicadas, beetles, etc. Yeah, weta (the banding code for Western Tanager). They do fly-catcher-like moves after waiting
motionless, except moving their heads from side to side. Their diet gives them the red color from a rare plumage pigment called rhododoxathin. No other tanager has this plumage. They also like fruit such as wild cherries, elderberries, blackberries and mulberries and eat them when they can.
Although I haven’t seen them nesting, they have flimsy to relatively stout, loosely woven, open bowls with three to five palish blue, bluish glaucous or bluish green eggs. They hatch in about 13 days. The male feeds the female until the chicks hatch, and then, she does all the work.
As for their song, it’s burry, like they have sore throats, slow, rambling but strong and deliberate, made up of four or five notes separated by a short pause. Their call is PUT-A-TICK which
is easier to remember than “pit-er-rick.” Hmmm, I wonder if they eat ticks.