A Summer Tanager, Piranga rubra, was seen in the Saint John area in April and into May, 2024. It was coming to a feeder so some birders were able to take beautiful photos. It is a second-year male in transition plumage from yellow-green to scarlet. Needless to say, it is a beautiful bird. See the photo above.
Summer Tanagers are members of the Cardinalidae family which they share with some grosbeaks, cardinals, buntings and the Dickcissel. Most members of this family have males with bright plumage and large conical shaped bills. Our most common tanager is the Scarlet Tanager which breeds here in summer and is found in the tree tops of mature deciduous forests. Occasionally a Western Tanager or a Summer Tanager appears here. That is what this blog post is about, the appearance of a Summer Tanager.
The breeding male Summer Tanager is unmistakable with its scarlet plumage overall and its greyish bill and dark legs. The female plumage is variable from pale greyish to orange-red. Sometimes it requires attention to shape, call notes or the colour of the dorsal feathers between the wings to identify some females. Pete Dunne describes the female plumage and that of immature birds as mustard yellow showing little or no contrast between wings and back, a few showing patches of orange (Pete Dunne's Essential Field Guide Companion, Houghton Mifflin Company 2006).
The Summer Tanager is larger than the Scarlet Tanager, 20 cm compared to 18 cm in length. Male Summer Tanagers are easy to tell from male Scarlet Tanagers because the Scarlet Tanagers have black wings. The females are more difficult. The female Scarlet Tanager has black or very dark wings. The female Summer Tanager’s wings are only minimally darker than the body. Some female Summer Tanagers show red or orange in their plumage and the female Scarlet Tanagers show only yellowish green or yellow. The female Summer Tanager has a yellow undertail surface which is lacking in the female Scarlet Tanager. The Summer Tanager has a longer bill and tail than the Scarlet Tanager.
Summer Tanagers nest 3 to 12 metres up in mature oak or pine trees on a horizontal limb. The nest is sometimes very loosely made of grass, stems and moss and lined with fine grasses. Sometimes the nest is so poorly made the eggs are visible from below. The nests of the western members of this species build their nests more compactly. Three to five light bluish green eggs marked with brown are incubated 11 to 12 days by the female. Adults feed on insects and fruits and are known to feed on bees and wasps. They forage in the tops of trees and glean insects from twigs and leaves and occasionally sally out for flying insects. When they catch bees and wasps they bring them to a perch and remove the stinger before eating by beating it against the branch. This species also readily comes to feeders which is a good reason our visitor has stayed around.
It is quite unusual for our visitor to be here. The normal range of the Summer Tanager is not close to here. They breed usually south of a line from southern New Jersey to southeastern Nebraska. They winter in Mexico and in Central and South America. It is rare but somewhat regular for them to overshoot and end up in the northeast.
The Summer Tanager is a robust singer. The song is a hurried whistled series of 2 to 4 note phrases which sound a bit like an oriole. The song usually consists of 3 to 10 sets of phrases followed by a pause and then another set. The Scarlet Tanager’s song is harsher and slower and less melodic.
The history of the naming of this species is interesting. It was first formally described by Carl Linnaeus in 1758 as Fringilla rubra. But he based his description on a bird described by Mark Catesby as the ‘summer red-bird’ in his book, The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands published in 1729-1732. Catesby called it the ‘Summer Red Bird’. That gave rise to the generic name, Piranga which is from the Tupi word, Tijepiranga, which means ‘small unknown bird’. The rubra in the scientific name means ‘red’, of course. So the Summer Tanager is named from ‘small unknown red bird’.
With nomenclature aside we are happy to occasionally have this species visit our province. It is not really very small and we are familiar with it so it is no longer the ‘small unknown red bird’.
Please search this blog for further information on the Summer Tanager.
