I’ve come to realize that unless your father was Fred Sibley, everytime you open up a field guide there is something there to learn. Too often it seems that people consult their field guides only when a hard identification presents itself in the field, rather than pouring over the text, images, and even maps that are present while at home. I’ll be the first to admit that I spend hours looking over my field guides during my free time, often just before bed, and I feel compared to most people I have a good, if not better, sense of species distribution, abundance, etc. However, I’ve recently come to find a bit of information that showed I didn’t know everything about bird distribution in North America (of course I never thought I did).

If anyone was ever to ask me to name the commonly occuring species of tanagers (Piranga) in North America (north of Mexico), I would quickly and easily rattle off 5 species: Scarlet (P. olivacea), Summer (P. rubra), Western (P. ludoviciana), Hepatic (P. flava) , and Flame-colored (P. bidentata). I would continue to say that the Scarlet, Summer, and Western were the most abundant, breeding across wide ranges in the US and parts of Canada. After that I would then add that annual visitations from vagrant Hepatic and Flame-colored Tanagers occurred, with the Flame-colored nesting time to time in places like the mountain canyons of west Texas, and southeast Arizona.

But, when I looked through my Sibley guide at the tanagers I’ve come to realize I was completely wrong on Hepatic Tanager. Not only does it occurr annually, it is a commonly occuring, breeding species of Arizona, New Mexico, and west Texas; on par with breeding the breeding status of Westerns in CA or Summers in NJ.

Once again it goes to show that just taking a few minutes to look over text you’ve looked over countless times proves that there is always something new to learn. So what is the benefit for me by knowing this info? At least now I know the next time I am in AZ and NM in a patch of pine-oak woods to be on the look out for a Tanager I previously thought shouldn’t even be there.

~Chad (2/28/06)