Red Birds in New York

Walk into a mature oak forest in the Hudson Valley in late May and the bird you hear first - before you see anything - is a hoarse, hurried carol dropping from somewhere fifty feet above you. When you finally locate the singer, he is a small flame: a blood-red body on jet-black wings, working the upper canopy of an oak he has flown from the Andes to reach. That is the Scarlet Tanager, Piranga olivacea, and he is here for exactly four months.

The two birds that most define New York’s red-bird calendar could not have arrived at their red by more different routes. The Northern Cardinal, Cardinalis cardinalis, holds his colour year-round, never molting into the dull winter dress that most songbirds retreat into after breeding. The Scarlet Tanager burns red from May through August, then molts back to olive-green before flying south. Seeing both species in the same spring morning - tanager high in the canopy, cardinal in the hedgerow below - is genuinely one of the better experiences in northeastern birding.

The cardinal’s long march north

At the turn of the twentieth century, cardinals were found in only two counties in southern New York. Ornithologists James DeKay and Elon Howard Eaton, who documented New York’s birds in that era, noted only scattered records along the coastal lowlands and the lower Hudson Valley. Cardinals were common in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. New York was, for them, a boundary.

The expansion that followed took most of the century to consolidate. By 1943 cardinals had nested for the first time in southern Connecticut. By 1958 they had reached Massachusetts. Research compiled by Cornell’s Project FeederWatch attributes the northward push to three converging forces: milder winters reducing snow cover and making winter foraging viable, suburban sprawl creating the brushy edge habitat the cardinal prefers over deep forest, and the growth of backyard feeding stations providing calories through December. According to Cornell’s All About Birds, the global cardinal population now stands at around 110 million birds and is growing.

He is now common throughout New York, with the notable exception of the higher elevations of the Adirondacks and Catskills. The Audubon Society’s field guide puts his measurements at 8 to 9 inches long with a wingspan of 9 to 12 inches. His diet runs from sunflower seeds and wild fruit to beetles, caterpillars, and grasshoppers in breeding season, when nestlings eat almost entirely insects. The female builds the nest, an open cup 3 to 10 feet above ground, and the pair typically raises two or three broods a year.

The Northern Cardinal’s expansion across New York over the twentieth century is one of the most documented examples of a species tracking human landscape change - suburban edges, winter feeders, and warming winters all pulled in the same direction at once.

The tanager and what it needs

The Scarlet Tanager asks considerably more of New York’s landscape than the cardinal does. Cornell’s All About Birds and NH Audubon’s State of the Birds database both list mature deciduous forest - oak, beech, and hemlock-hardwood mixes - as the primary breeding habitat, with a minimum viable patch size of roughly 40 acres. Forest fragments below that threshold produce sharply lower breeding success: Brown-headed Cowbirds parasitise nests more heavily at forest edges, and the deep canopy foraging that the tanager depends on simply does not exist in small woodlots.

Males arrive in New York around the second week of May - the first week of May in the city, the second in the Catskills and Adirondacks at elevation. They hunt caterpillars by sallying, flying out from a perch to catch insects mid-flight before returning, and they spend most of their time in the top third of the canopy. NH Audubon’s state monitoring notes the species is “more often heard than seen,” and that assessment is accurate even for experienced observers. The distinctive chip-burr call gives away far more tanagers than the eye ever finds.

By September the male has molted out of red entirely. He retains the black wings through the non-breeding season but his body goes to olive-green before he flies to the mid-elevation Andes of South America for the northern winter. The population has been declining since the 1980s, per NH Audubon’s long-term data, with forest loss and fragmentation at both ends of the migration route the primary driver. The cardinal molts differently - losing and regrowing feathers every summer without the radical colour change - because a non-migratory bird and a long-distance migrant face different pressures on visibility and energy.

The other red birds

Three other species reliably show red plumage in New York. The male House Finch carries a raspberry-red wash on his head, throat, and upper breast - the intensity varies by diet, so two males at the same feeder can look quite different. House Finches were introduced to New York in the 1950s and are now the default urban and suburban finch. The Purple Finch, which overlaps at feeders, is deeper raspberry with a notched tail. Cornell’s All About Birds notes that Purple Finches lose direct encounters with House Finches more than 95 per cent of the time; their numbers in eastern New York have fallen as House Finches moved in.

The Rose-breasted Grosbeak, Pheucticus ludovicianus, arrives in May alongside the tanager and is more approachable than any bird on this list. He is large - near cardinal-sized - with a boldly defined crimson triangle on a white breast. He visits feeders and sits in the open. Cornell Lab describes his song as resembling a robin’s but more musical. He is, genuinely, one of the easiest birds to see well if you are in the right habitat in the right week, and most people who find him for the first time cannot explain how they missed him before.

When and where

Species	Red feature	Season in New York
Northern Cardinal	Full body red, male	Year-round
Scarlet Tanager	Body red, black wings, male	May to September
Rose-breasted Grosbeak	Crimson breast triangle, male	May to August
House Finch	Head and breast, male	Year-round
Purple Finch	Raspberry wash, male	Year-round, less common

The most concentrated month for red birds in New York is May. The cardinal has been singing since February. The tanager arrives around the 10th, the grosbeak with him. A mature Hudson Valley forest at mid-month - oak canopy above, shrubby edge below - can produce all five species in a single morning.

For comparison, the orange birds in Ohio and orange birds in Michigan posts cover similar species assemblages across the Great Lakes states, where tanager and grosbeak ranges overlap with New York’s. New York sits at the northern edge of the cardinal’s year-round band and the southern margin of the Adirondack crossbill zone, which is why the winter and summer lists here look quite different from each other.

The Scarlet Tanager is the species to plan around. The cardinal at your feeder will be there in January. The tanager has a flight of four thousand miles ahead of him, and in September he will make it without you knowing he has gone.