Hundreds of birders have flocked to a sleepy village in the county of Yorkshire to see to the colourful Scarlet Tanager.
Birdwatching world in shock as strange songster from the Americas turns up in English village
The UK’s birdwatching world was a flutter this week with news that a Scarlet Tanager (Piranga olivacea) had appeared on a washing line in Yorkshire.
Normally it’s a bird that migrates across the Gulf of Mexico from its summer breeding grounds in northern and eastern North America to overwinter in the montane forests of Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador in South America.
To turn up in the northeast of England, this young, first-winter male had been seriously blown off course by the strong prevailing winds following recent storms in the Atlantic.
- How do birds know when and where to migrate?
- Do birds that get lost migrating ever find their way home?
Such events are not unknown, but they are rare – the last Scarlet Tanager to be seen anywhere in the UK was 10 years ago and there have only ever been eight recorded sightings in the country.
Previous arrivals have been on the eastern side of the country, on the island of Barra in the Outer Hebrides, in Ireland and in Cornwall. To have made it all the way to the village of Shelf on the edge of Bradford in Yorkshire this little bird, weighing only around 30 grams, must have crossed the country unseen at night.
What do Scarlet Tanagers look like?
Female birds and juveniles such as this one are normally hard to spot in their home range, as their plumage is yellowish-green with dark brown-green wings.
Mature males are the showy birds with blood-red bodies and jet-black wings (see above). In this bird’s case, the less dense foliage of a cul-de-sac garden provided little cover to hide it from the gaze of dozens of eagle-eyed birders who had travelled long distances to add it to their UK lists.
Scarlet Tanagers are somewhat mis-named. The species was originally placed in the tanager family of American songbirds but it was recently reclassified to be a member of the cardinal group. In their winter habitat they travel in mixed foraging flocks with flycatchers, antbirds and other species of tanagers.
What do Scarlet Tanagers eat and how do they hunt?
To catch their prey of moths, leafhoppers, bees and wasps, locusts and other flying insects, they employ a hunting style known as sallying – leaving a high perch in a tree to snatch the bugs out of the air and return to the perch to consume them. With hornets and the like, the birds rub the abdomens backwards and forwards along a branch to remove the stings before they eat them.
Although there are likely to be slim pickings for the Yorkshire bird, tanagers are also known to eat fruit, earthworms and snails when necessary, and our milder winter may help it survive to thrill even more ardent birders.
Top image: Females and young males have similar plumage. By Félix Uribe, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons