Photo by George Wall

This is my 43^rd Item of the Month and when I looked down the list, I didn’t see a tanager. In Arizona, we can see the Summer Tanager, Hepatic Tanager, Scarlet Tanager, once in a while the Flame-colored Tanager and the one we see the most often – the Western Tanager which is what I’m covering in this Item of the Month.

Description:  The male has a black back; yellow rump, breast and neck; a yellow streak on the wings; and a reddish head. The picture above shows the start of a reddish head. The female is paler and without the reddish head.

Habitat:  They are a migratory bird that arrives in mid April. They prefer coniferous trees like ponderosa pine and sometimes deciduous trees like cottonwoods mostly in the mountains. They are usually solitary and stay very high in the trees. By October, they’ve headed back south of the border into Mexico and Central America.

Nesting:  They are monogamous and usually bonded for life. The female builds as loosely constructed nest high in a conifer tree normally in a fork and nest from June-July. They have 2-5 eggs that are bluish/greenish marked with brown.

Diet: They like wasps and other insects. They can be drawn to fruit at feeders like halves of oranges. 

Range:  They are found from the western half of the U.S. all the way into Canada during migration. 

Interesting Facts:  The Western Tanager breeds farther north than any other member of its mostly tropical family.

The red pigment in the face of the Western Tanager is rhodoxanthin, a pigment rare in birds. It is not manufactured by the bird, as are the pigments used by the other red tanagers. Instead, it must be acquired from the diet, presumably from insects that themselves acquire the pigment from plants.