Western Tanagers Are Flashes of Bright Color

BirdNote^® 
Western Tanagers Are Flashes of Bright Color 
Written by Monica Gokey

This is BirdNote.

A male Western Tanager chirps loudly from the branch of a Douglas fir.

         [Beat of quick up-down-up chirp]

The tanager’s tune is as sharp as his brightly colored red head. With a yellow body jacketed in black, the Western Tanager is a flash of bright color in the coniferous forests of the West.

         [Western Tanager tune]

Sounds almost like a robin, doesn’t it?

Western Tanagers dart from tree to tree, on the lookout for delicious bugs. They find them by scanning the tree bark —  or maybe snatching them from mid-air during flight — a tactic called hawking. Nuts and fruits round out this little songbird’s diet.

The Western Tanager can breed farther north than any other North American tanager, as far up as Southeast Alaska and the Yukon.

But come winter, these little birds head south. The male’s red head fades to yellow in the off-season. Still, the tanagers’ sharp colorful suits help them fit right in with the other brightly colored tropical birds they’ll spend the winter with in Mexico and Central America.

         [Western Tanager]

Head on over to our website and catch more on the Western Tanager — BirdNote.org. I’m Mary McCann.

BirdNote gives you the sounds of birds every day, and you can get the sights as well when you follow us on Instagram: @BirdNoteRadio

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Senior Producer: Mark Bramhill
Producer: Sam Johnson
Managing Producer: Jazzi Johnson
Managing Producer: Ariana Remmel
Content Director: Jonese Franklin

Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Western Tanager [ML66861] recorded by W Gunn. BirdNote’s theme composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
© 2019 BirdNote   January 2019/2020/2026 & May 2023    
Narrator: Mary McCann

ID#  WETA-03-2019-01-18  WETA-03