This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s our other red bird, the Summer Tanager (Piranga rubra).
Draw a line to a branched tine high in a pine and there you’ll find birds that shine bold of ruby and gold. With the end of winter’s cold, stepping into spring’s hold, summer’s Tanagers are pulled to the Lowcountry; they fall upon our forests once more. Summer Tanagers are part of the Cardinal family, Cardinalidae, which contains some of our most stunning songbird species. Our Summer Tanagers are no exception here. Males radiate a deep and vibrant scarlet-red across their entire body, contrasted only by beaded black eyes and a bone-yellow bill, heavy and faintly down-turned. Females are stunners too, with feathers saturated a saffron-yellow over undertones of olive-green, which shows most strongly through their wings.
Summer Tanagers spend the winter in the tropics of Central and South America. They return to the Southern United States around the spring equinox, reaching the South Carolina Lowcountry on the first week of April most years. Upon arrival, they begin establishing territories in wooded locales. They prefer patrolling open woodlands, savannas, maritime forests, field edges, and park lands. Places with wide spaced trees or an uneven low canopy. On the Sea Islands, males most often perch atop a Live Oak or pine and begin singing their own praises, a jumbled, oscillating whistle that echoes over the forest, a sonic fence to stake a claim of land. When not mending fencing or disputing borders, Summer Tanagers can be heard moving through the treetops uttering a trademark “pi-tick” call or chattering “pi-ti-tu” as they go.
Summer Tanagers are leaf gleaners and hawkers, scanning limbs and twigs for a quick insect snack but also jetting out into the air to snatch insects from the sky. They will eat a fair share of fruits too when in season. Summer Tanagers are specialized for eating bees and wasps, brazenly busting into hornet hives and ripping open wasp nests to eat their larvae or hawking bees on the wing for a honey-glazed meal. It’s not known whether they have any special resistance to bee and wasp venoms, or if they’re just fearless in the face of a free lunch.
Despite being an abundant, noisy, brightly colored, courageous killer of bees, Summer Tanagers are often hard to get good, close looks at. Like its other Cardinalid cousins, to include Grosbeaks and Buntings, they are curious but skittish creatures. Often they drop in to investigate neighborhood commotions, when Wrens and Titmice start sounding alarms, but will almost always dart out of sight if you turn your attention towards them.
