How to Know the Birds: No. 9, What Birders Want—Western Tanagers

Across a large swath of the ABA Area, it has been a remarkable spring for seeing western tanagers. These radiant birds have been showing up all across the western Great Lakes region, where they don’t ordinarily occur. Birders at oases in the Desert Southwest have been reporting migrants in numbers considerably in excess of normal. And here in the Rocky Mountain region, where I live and where the western tanager is usually fairly common in spring, the species has been fantastically, ridiculously, off-the-charts abundant.

The reasons for this will be explored in detail in the months to come in regional ornithological publications and in the quarterly journal North American Birds, published by the American Birding Association. I’m looking forward to seeing the analysis, but that’s not what I’m about right now. No, I want to spend a bit of time reflecting on the human dimension of the “Great Western Tanager Fallout of 2019.”

The date was Sunday, May 19. We’d had a nice run of days with clear skies and warm temperatures—but everything had changed overnight. The temperature was in the mid-30s, a very fine mist was falling, and the cloud ceiling was lowering during the course of our bird walk. Toward the end of the morning’s ramble, we came upon a commotion of birds and humans. The birds were western tanagers, the humans were ordinary townsfolk.

Video by © Ted Floyd.

I want to mention in passing two other things. They’re interrelated. The first is that there were many additional birds, including “good” birds like clay-colored sparrows, at the preserve that week. The clay-colored sparrow is a birder’s bird, small and obscure, clad in grays and browns, tricky to ID. I, personally, delight in seeing clay-colored sparrows. Hang onto that thought for a moment.

The second thing is something Kenn Kaufman said in an interview in Birding magazine in 2007. The question was about how the efforts of “serious” birders can sometimes harm the cause of birding. Here’s how Kaufman responded: