Scarlet Tanager / Piranga olivacea

I first heard about Scarlet Tanagers in my vertebrate zoology class last semester. It sticks out to me personally not only because it's bright red and hard to miss, but because it's the opposite coloring of one of my favorite birds, the red wing blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus). I was driving through Raccoon Creek State Park with my wife when we noticed a large number of them near the center of the park in the middle of May. This is a park I've spent a lot of time at during all seasons and I had never seen one until this year. This caused me to do a little extra research and figure out why I haven't seen one when they were all of a sudden so common. The park is also only a 20 minute/10 mile drive from my house so I was also curious why I never seen them closer to home.

The Cornell Lab website quickly told me that these birds were in Pennsylvania, as well as other northern states and Canada, for their breeding season. The breeding duration is only 2 weeks long, so I felt lucky to have seen them when I did. So why wasn't I seeing them near home? Simply because they require a large patch size and prefer the interior forest rather than the edge. While the male red and easy to spot, the female is more subdued but still stands out with a yellow body and black wings, somewhat similar to an American goldfinch (Spinus tristis. I spent a decent amount of time trying to get the picture posted here since they weren't typically in the trees. They spent most of their time eating small insects or seeds from the ground. Another bird that seemed to share the same area was the eastern bluebird (Sialia sialis). I had originally thought that maybe I didn't seem them the last few years because of low population sizes, but that doesn't seem to be the case since they have been at an increasing trend the last few years. This is definitely something I'll take the time to observe next year.

Posted on July 17, 2020 11:29 PM by gzaborowski