Western Tanager print

A flame-red head. A body the colour of a lemon. Black wings, and two pale wing bars cutting across them. The Western Tanager perches on a pine branch, wings folded, the warm end of the spectrum set against the sage-green needles and cream-ground of the Audubon-style plate. It looks like a bird from a more tropical latitude, visiting the conifer woods by accident. It is in fact the most northerly-breeding of all the tanagers.

Piranga ludoviciana carries one of the more unusual colour facts in North American ornithology: the male’s red head is not produced by the bird itself. It comes from rhodoxanthin, a rare pigment taken in through diet - most likely from insects that have fed on specific plants. No other North American bird acquires its head colour in quite this way. The red fades as the breeding season wears on, deepest in early spring, washing toward orange by summer.

The species breeds across the open conifer forests of the mountain West, from western Canada through the Rockies into the highlands of Mexico, favouring pine, fir and Douglas-fir. Come autumn it leaves entirely for Mexico and Central America - a long-distance migration for a bird that nests in places as cool as the Canadian Rockies. The call that identifies it before the colour does is a dry, rattling pit-er-ick, three crisp notes from high in the canopy.

In summer it takes insects, including wasps caught in mid-air. In late summer it turns to fruit, and western garden feeders occasionally receive a brief, startling visit.

In the tradition of Audubon, a bird of high western pines, brought to the page.

Full field guide: /species/western-tanager/

Printed on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag 308gsm.