Western Tanager

About the Western Tanager

The breeding male Western Tanager is one of the most vivid birds in the West: flaming red-orange head, brilliant yellow body, and jet-black back, wings, and tail with two wing bars. Females and fall males are yellow-green with the same double wing bars, and the red face fades outside the breeding season.

Unlike most red birds, the male's head color comes from a pigment it cannot make itself - rhodoxanthin, acquired from insects in its diet. Western Tanagers breed in open conifer and mixed forests of the western mountains, foraging deliberately in the canopy for insects and adding fruit heavily in migration.

In Texas the species is a spring and fall migrant, common in the Trans-Pecos and regular to uncommon eastward; migrants turn up at fruiting trees, flowering agaves, and desert oases, and a few winter along the border.