365 urban species. #273: Scarlet Tanager

[urbpan]

Photos by cottonmanifesto. Location: out my living room window, Brookline.

Urban species #273: Scarlet tanager. Piranga olivacea

Fortune has provided this bird enthusiast with two things that have led to his seeing today, his second ever scarlet tanager. First, the city in which I live is in a migration corridor--thousands of birds pass through Boston, stopping to rest or to eat, before continuing south in fall. Second, there is a pair of flowering dogwood trees in the small dirt area between our building and the sidewalk. These dogwood trees are paying back the tremendous amount of rain they soaked up in May with an abundance of plump red fruits. Resident birds like starlings, sparrows, and robins are gobbling them up, but a few migrators have started visiting, including the tanager in these pictures.

Tanagers are insect- and fruit-eating songbirds that occur mainly in the American tropics. There are only a handful of species that reach into North America, and of these only the scarlet tanager is a likely visitor to Boston. During the breeding season the male is as red as a cardinal, but with black wings and no crest. The only other scarlet tanager I've ever seen was a male singing his hoarse robinlike song, from high in a tree in the Mount Auburn cemetery. It was summer, and his breeding plumage was shockingly red, and unmistakable.

At first I assumed the bird in these pictures was a female--they wear greenish plumage year-round. But now that I have time to study the pictures, the rich black feathers on the bird's "shoulders" (scapular feathers, to be accurate) identify it as a non-breeding male. He stayed near my home for several hours today, eating dogwood fruits and nervously watching the activity in my living room, as two humans, two dogs, and a cat watched back. Perhaps tomorrow he will return for another helping, or perhaps he will continue his flight to Central America.