Saw a second year male Summer Tanager in Sherburne NWR on Saturday morning, July 8th. This bird is in heavy molt and is basicly red on the front and back quarters and greenish/yellow in the middle half of the bird, with greenish yellow wings. The bird had a red tail which clearly eliminates an early molting Scarlet Tanager as scarlets have black tails. We found a image on Google of a summer from July 17th that nearly matched our bird so clearly all summers have not molted to the all red color by this time period. There were other June dated images that also showed the mixed colors.
This bird was originally found by Helen Wang on July 4th. The bird was on the left side of the Blue Hill trail well before you get to the trail to top of Blue Hill. More or less about the begining of the woods. If you remember where the Hooded Warbler was, it was before that area. Helen had seen the bird on the lower right trail past the bench. We would judge these areas to be about 250-300 yards apart but this species appears to have territories that can be this large. At least the species at Lebanon Hills has had in at least one year a territory almost a 1/4 mile long according to Jim Mattson. The summer was not singing but went into the same dead tree a scarlet was singing from. The scarlet had moved south from the past Hooded Warbler area singing on territory. When it got to this area the summer seemed to confront it and the scarlet slowly moved back north, continuing to sing. The summer at that point moved to the south and we lost it. A bird not singing can be really hard to follow. Pastor Al had a summer on the Mahnoman trail last year in May so there may be a small breeding or hybrid population somewhere in Sherburne. Dennis and Barbara Martin [email protected]
