Overview
The Western Tanager (Piranga ludoviciana) is an incandescent, tropical-colored songbird that brings a burst of rainforest brilliance to the high conifer forests of the American West. Adult breeding males are unforgettable: sporting a glowing flame-orange to scarlet-red head, brilliant lemon-yellow body, and contrasting charcoal-black back, wings, and tail adorned with two crisp wing bars.
Biology and Physical Characteristics
Piranga ludoviciana has a stout, pointed bill with a subtle tooth-like serration on the cutting edge (tomial tooth) used for handling hard-bodied insects. The male’s radiant red head color is derived from rhodoxanthin, a rare carotenoid pigment obtained directly from its diet of insects. Females and non-breeding birds display a gentle olive-green back, soft yellow underparts, and pale wing bars that provide camouflage in the canopy.
Behavior and Ecology
A master canopy flycatcher, the Western Tanager spends most of its time high in the crowns of Douglas firs and ponderosa pines, plucking insects from needles or darting out into open air to snatch flying wasps and bees. Before swallowing stinging insects, it expertly rubs them against tree bark to remove the stinger. During autumn migration, it supplements its insect diet with wild elderberries, serviceberries, and mulberries.
Conservation and Human Impact
Classified as Least Concern by the IUCN, the Western Tanager maintains large, stable breeding populations throughout the mountain ranges of western North America. It benefits from broad tracts of continuous montane conifer forests and is protected internationally under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
Interesting Factoid
The fiery red color on the male Western Tanager’s head comes from rhodoxanthin, an extremely rare pigment in birds that the tanager acquires by eating insects that consumed it from plants, rather than synthesizing it internally.