Earth Almanac: July/August 2005

Summer Songs

Birdsong diminishes in summer, but now there are new carolers. High in hardwood canopies of the East and Midwest the scarlet tanager—among the most brilliant of our neotropical migrants—hunts caterpillars, periodically breaking into song. He won't arrive until the leaves are fully formed and offer him cover, and you may not see him even then. But if you are patient and persistent, you will hear him. He sounds like a robin with a sore throat, but you can't be sure until the indisputable proof of his call note: chick-burr. The drabber, olive-and-yellow female sings, too, though more softly. Because the bird is something of a ventriloquist, one that sounds far away may be directly overhead. Walk past the point from which you perceive the sound to be emanating, then look up. Recalling his late-19th-century childhood, ornithologist Edward Howe Forbush wrote: “The scarlet tanager was a bird of which I dreamed, but which I never saw. However, as soon as I became familiar with its note, I found it a common woodland sound.”