A not-so-Scarlet Tanager

This is a male Scarlet Tanager in breeding season. Brilliant crimson with jet black wings. It is a bird of the deep woods, heard more often than seen.

It has a simple but pretty song:

This is a fledgling, having left its nest perhaps 10m above the ground at about 10 days old. It is seemingly all alone, and hungry.

But along comes papa, with a bug:

though he seems to have eaten it himself:

But the adult reappears, this time with what looks like a green caterpillar:

The fledgling moves further away, but the adult finds it:

and makes quite sure the chick doesn’t drop its meal as it frantically flaps to stay upright:

One last image, an artistic accident when Lightroom took matters into its own hands rather successfully:

Now you may have been thinking that surely this adult was a female, since it isn’t scarlet all over. But the female is a dusky olive, with no trace of red. It took me a while, but I eventually realized that this is indeed a male, and August is the month when they molt their breeding plumage and revert to their non-breeding plumage, a bright olive green (still with black wings). It is part-way through this process, hence the blotchy garb.

This chick is late in the season (the photos were taken on August 13th) and it will need to migrate from mid-September onwards. Let’s hope it makes it to its winter home in NW South America.

PS Scarlet Tanagers are not found in Europe, until November 2024:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg571eygj97o#

PPS The word tanager comes from Tupí tanagorá, via Portuguese tangará.