SCARLET TANAGER
1. Male. 2. Female
Well, there came a Saturday, with its half-holiday for clerks, and I went into the country, where I betook myself to the woods of my native village, the woods wherein I had rambled all the years of my boyhood. And that afternoon, before I came out of them, I put my opera-glass on two of those wonderful scarlet and black birds. It was a day to be remembered.
Since that time, of course, I have seen many like them. In one sense, their beauty has become to me an old story; but I hope that I have set here and there a reader on a hunt that has been as happily rewarded as mine was on that bright summer afternoon. In one respect, the beginner has a great advantage over an old hand. He has the pleasure of more excitement and surprise.
The bird to be looked for is a little longer than a bluebird, of a superb scarlet color except for its wings and tail, which, as I have said, are jet black. I speak of the male in full spring costume. His mate does not show so much as a red feather, but is greenish yellow, or yellowish green, with dark—not black—wings and tail.
You may see the tanager once in a while in the neighborhood of your house, if the grounds are set with shade-trees, but for the most part he lives in woods, especially in hard woods of a fairly old growth.
One of the first things for you to do, with him as with all birds, is to acquaint yourself with his call-notes and his song. The call is of two syllables, and sounds like chip-chirr. It is easily remembered after you have once seen the bird in the act of uttering it. The song is much in the manner of the robin’s, but less smooth and flowing. I have often thought, and sometimes said, that it is just such a song as the robin might give us if he were afflicted with what people call a “hoarse cold.” The bird sings as if his whole heart were engaged, but at the same time in a noticeably broken and short-winded style.
The oftener you hear him, the easier you will find it to distinguish him from a robin, although at first you may find yourself badly at a loss. A boy that can tell any one of twenty playmates by the tones of his voice alone will need nothing but practice and attention to do the same for a great part of the sixty or seventy kinds of common birds living in the woods and fields about him.
The tanager’s nest is built in a tree, on the flat of a level branch, so to speak, generally toward the end. Sometimes, at any rate, it is a surprisingly loose, carelessly constructed thing, through the bottom of which one can see the blue or bluish eggs while standing on the ground underneath.
It must be plain to any one that the mother bird, in her dull greenish dress, is much less easily seen, and therefore much less in danger, as she sits brooding, than she would be if she wore the flaming scarlet feathers that render her mate so handsome.