13 Down, 2 to Go

Greetings once again from the road. I have to say, birding wise things are going quite well on our trip to the northwest. 54 species have been added to my annual count and with the 3 lifers found today that number includes a total of 13 first timers. Not too shabby and we are not even a third of the way through the excursion. We are officially at the site of the Canine Performance Events Agility Nationals (outside Seattle/Tacoma) and time for Ruger and Linda to take to the ring. The birding will take a back seat for a few days while attention shifts to the obstacle course. Once that is over we’ll be focused back on our feathered friends…speaking of which, let’s get you to today’s feature.

Continuing with the theme, hit the jump to read more about this southwestern specialty.

Not to slight Brad as I had planned to feature another of his adventures to close out the month, but I ended up having some extra time and assuming I’ll need his help even more in the coming month – banking posts when I can. This also gives me a chance to leverage this month’s theme of “May I have another chance” to bring you another one of my sub-par executions. Trust me, you deserve better – heavy handed work in the digital darkroom and the smaller image size makes these shots look way better than they really are.

Unless you happen to live in Arizona or New Mexico, you may not be familiar with this particular bird. With that said, I will go out on a thick limb and guarantee you have seen members in its family. This bird is known as the Hepatic Tanager – one of the worst named birds out there. Similar to the previous post on the Plumbeous Vireo (link here), I had to climb up to the top shelf in the library, pull down the dictionary (again), thumb to the ‘H’s only to scratch my head – “Why is this bird named after the liver?“. When you look at this bird do you immediately think of our largest organ responsible for producing bile for digestion and detoxifying our blood? It has other roles, but you get my point. So now I have to dig deeper and the best I can tell is they consider the deeper red hues of this species to be similarly colored to the liver. I can see it now – hmmm, we have the Scarlet, the Summer, the Western, the Flame-Colored (will get to this one in a bit)…I know, we shall call it liver and all in the room rejoiced.

To be honest, I do think it is the least appealing of the Tanagers, but that is less of this bird’s fault and more of the others being overly stunning. To steal and tweak a line from Orwell’s Animal Farm, “All Tanagers are beautiful, but some Tanagers are more beautiful than others“.

The Hepatic name was not the only Rabbit hole I went down researching for this post – and they wonder why we barely manage to get 6 posts out a month hehehehe. Quiz time. True or False, the Hepatic Tanager (and the 4 other Tanagers mentioned earlier) are in the same family as the 300+ Tanager species found in Central and South America? If you responded with “False“, then I bow to your birding knowledge or you know how this game is played and picked the non-obvious answer. The North American Tanagers are unrelated to those other similarly named species and are cataloged in the family Cardinalidae – which is why I was confident you were familiar with at least one of its other family members. With the tinning of this specimen, I now have checked off 13 of the 15 members of this family. All I have left is the Varied Bunting and the Flame-Colored Tanager. I will be trying hard to close that gap on our return leg of our current trip – they both have very small footprints in southern Arizona.

Quick digression – while trying to figure out the odd family placement of the US Tanagers I noticed something else that was strange and didn’t know. The Cardinalidae family also has the Grosbeaks in it – Rose-Breasted, Black-Headed and Blue. Just so happens I am currently hunting the Evening Grosbeak up here in the northwest and it wasn’t listed – all I needed, another time gobbling hole. Since this is a bit off topic, I’ll just tell you I found it in the Fringillidae famly along with the Pine Grosbeak (forgot about that one), a bunch of Hawaiian birds, Crossbills and Finches. These are the name confusions we need to be fixing.

Found the ladder, now out of the research holes – sorry about that. This particular specimen was found while visiting Santa Rita Lodge in Madera Canyon. Primarily known for its Hummingbird feeders, we managed to find several other +1s hanging about. This is an incredible place to bird and HIGHLY recommend checking it out. Parking is limited so you might have to walk a bit to get to the site depending on how busy it is. Liver-dude made only a brief appearance giving me less than 5 minutes in total owing to the rushed shots.

Unfortunately, there isn’t really a lot I can add about this particular Tanager. Even Cornell commented there has not been a lot of studies on this species – can’t blame them, would you want to study the Tanager with Scarlet in the name or Liver?

In absence of interesting tidbits to take away from today’s featured feathered friend, I am going to give you a quick video of another lifer we managed to get on top of Mt Rainier a few days ago. It was such an amazing experience I didn’t want you to have to wait until we got back and process the shots to enjoy it…okay, okay, more like a year at the rate I have been going. So, here is our latest find, the Sooty Grouse! (If the embedded link does not play in your browser, here is the direct link here)

What an amazing experience for a lifer!

Take care everyone, with the way the schedule is going I’ll likely will not be seeing you again until we turn the page to June. Until then, happy birding!