Summer Tanager

Birding will make you believe in patterns. It will teach you that there is no such thing as coincidence, just patterns you can’t discern. There’s a difference.

You go your whole life without seeing a bird, and then suddenly, you’re in the right place at the right time and there it is. That in an of itself is remarkable and satisfying, but often that’s not the end of the story, often that’s just the point at which you step into some pattern that begins to repeat. Often, the next thing you know, you see that bird everywhere you go. That was my experience with the Summer Tanager.

I was sitting out one evening at Watson Mill State Park when I heard a call I didn’t recognize. It was already well into twilight and I had put away my binoculars for the day, but I went back inside the bus and grabbed them. I scanned the trees a bit and tried the walk toward the sound, but I didn’t see anything. I kept walking up a little rise toward a big pine that was off by itself.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a red streak flash by. I dismissed it as a Cardinal, but then some pattern recognizing part of my brains said no, that’s not quite right. So I tracked it and brought the binoculars to my eyes and sure enough, not a Cardinal, a Summer Tanager. It moved through pretty quickly, but I got a good enough look to identify it. Despite it being spring I did not see a female with it.

Two nights later we were several hundred miles west and north, at a campground on the Natchez Trace when I saw another flash of red that wasn’t quite Cardinal like and once again it turned out to be a Summer Tanager. This time though there was a female around too. They chattered in the woods right around our camp, the kids got to see them.

Later that night Corrinne and I were sitting by the fire when it flew right up into the tree above the fire and watched us for a good five minutes, seemingly impervious to the smoke rising up past it. It was watching the female gather twigs on the ground behind us, if we registered at all in its world we didn’t mean much to it.