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The scarlet tanager is red, too, but it has black wings, and it isn't called a redbird; and the crossbill is red, with a few white feathers, and it isn't called a redbird either. Only the cardinal grosbeak is. That was what you saw," she repeated. "And who told you all this?" I queried. "Nobody," the little girl made reply. "I looked it up in the library." She was only ten.
That former arch-enemy of the cattle in the days of Vergil seems to have disappeared: that “flying pest,” the asilo of the Romans and the aestrum of the Greeks, which in antique times was wont to drive the grazing herds frantic with terror and pain, until the valley of the Tanager and the Alburnian woods re-echoed with the agonised lowing of the poor tortured creatures.
"Say, look at the Red-bird," he shouted, as a Tanager flitted onto a low branch and blazed in the sun. "Bet I hit him first shot!" and he drew an arrow. "Here you, Saphead," said Sam, "quit that shooting at little birds. It's bad medicine. It's against the rules; it brings bad luck it brings awful bad luck. I tell you there ain't no worse luck than Da's raw-hide that I know."
My heart went out to the dozens of bobolink and song-sparrow babies buried under the matted grass, the little tawny thrushes wandering around cold and comfortless on the soaked ground in the woods, the warbler infants, redstart and chestnut-sided that I knew were sitting humped up and miserable in some watery place under the berry bushes, the young tanager only just out of the nest, and the two cuckoo babies, thrust out of their home at the untimely age of seven days, to shiver around on their weak blue legs.
At the time I did not notice the singularity of his remark, my attention being absorbed in contemplating the unfortunate tanager. "Look how its feathers are scorched," I said. "I know it," Hall replied, without glancing at the bird. "And it is covered with a film of artemisium," I added, a little piqued by his abstraction. "I know that, too."
"That is a Summer Tanager the only one I ever saw in this neighbourhood It is so rare here that I shot it to make sure there was no mistake, and you probably never saw one alive, for the Summer Tanager is a tender bird, who seldom strays so far north as this. But see what do you think of this isn't it a beauty?"
This was not stupidity on the part of the crimson-head, nor was it foolhardiness; it was simply trust in his guardian, for he had one, one who watched every movement of ours with close attention, whose vigilance was never relaxed, and who appeared, when we saw her, to be above the need of food. A plain personage she was, clad in modest, dull yellow, the female tanager.
So the golden-wing, the tanager, and the orioles would bear their colors harmoniously into any successful tulip design. South of the Alleghany Mountains I have not found as fine specimens of this tree as I have in Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana. Everywhere the saw-mills are fast making sad havoc. The walnut and the tulip are soon to be no more as "trees with the trees in the forest."
If he passed over your head, you would note the delicate flush under his wings. That bit of bright scarlet on yonder dead hemlock, glowing like a live coal against the dark background, seeming almost too brilliant for the severe northern climate, is his relative, the scarlet tanager. I occasionally meet him in the deep hemlocks, and know no stronger contrast in nature.
When the tanager turned savagely and gave his faithful friend a severe peck, instead of resenting it the hurt bird flew to another perch, where he stood a long time, uttering occasionally a low, plaintive call, as if of reproach, all his cheerfulness gone, a melancholy sight indeed. I waited only for warm days to set free the tanager, and at last they came.
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