by Tim Homan
After hiking and touring from early morning to mid-afternoon, Page and I returned to camp for rest and a little reading. During the early evening we sat together on the picnic table-talking softly, writing in our trip journals, and planning the next day's hike. We wrote entries for a new aquatic chick sighting. While walking around a scenic front-country lake, Manzanita, we were treated to good looks, especially close on several occasions, at the fuzzy and fluffy young of the Pied-billed Grebe for the first time ever. The greblings were tricked out in black-and-white stripes above the waterline. Their eyes and the bases of their bills were ringed in yellow. An intermittent halo of orange-red crowned their heads with an additional flourish of color.
Page was sitting at the end of the picnic table's length; I was sitting to her left, one seat closer to the center. One of our small camp chairs was tucked under the short width of the table nearest Page, the top tube of its backrest rising an inch or two above the height of the table. A few minutes after closing our trip journals, around six and time to start supper, Page spotted a Western Tanager perched on a dead lower limb of a tall Douglas fir along the outer perimeter of camp off to the side of a pop-up camper four sites away. We raised our binoculars and focused on the neo-tropical migrant, a resplendent male about 45 yards out.
Page and I watched with subdued enthusiasm as the tanager flew closer to us along the outer edge of camp, alighting low in a ponderosa pine sapling behind a large tent three sites away. We focused on his vivid colors again, now from the shorter distance of around 35 yards. After holding still for perhaps ten seconds, this avian gem of the western coniferous forests flapped closer to us again, this time flying diagonally to his left further into the campground, where he landed in another sapling ponderosa 15 feet from the picnic table on the empty site two away from us. Now, a little more than 25 yards from us, the passerine began to spark some genuine interest. We sat up straight and glassed the gaudy songbird again. This time the tanager's vibrant colors, closer now and set off against the ponderosa's conifer green, elicited our customary comment of mock nonchalance, "ho hum, merely beautiful."
After the same short interval the male tanager skimmed low and came to a stop on the top rung of our site's upraised grill-grating 8 paces away. We were now impressed, interested and appreciative again. We focused on him with newfound intensity and speed, fully aware of how ephemeral a bird and its beauty can be, fully aware of how long it might be before we returned to Western Tanager territory during the male's seasonal splendor again.
He remained on his metal perch, as colorful as a tropical parrot, slowly inspecting the ground all around. That close through binocs the songbird's four colors-orange-red of Indian paintbrush, yellow of sundrops, black of obsidian, white of snow-nearly splashed through our lenses. Orange-red head, yellow sash on the black wing, more bright yellow on breast, belly, and rump; white wingbar, forked black tail and black saddle splitting the yellow on the back … all of the bird's breeding-plumage beauty so close through the optical magic of our binoculars.
Then, when we thought he would surely half-loop around us, a remarkable thing happened. The Western Tanager winged his way straight toward us, creating an uncomfortable visual sensation that made us involuntarily recoil and flinch. At the very last part of a second, when it appeared that the increasingly blurry bird was going to smack one of us in the head, he suddenly veered out of our field of focus. Before we had time to think that he had buzzed right over our ballcaps, we both saw him sitting calm as a pet canary atop our camp chair within easy reach of Page's right hand.
We remained still and silent, our unaided eyes gulping down the glory of his colors. He looked like an artful amalgam between a male Scarlet Tanager and a male American Goldfinch, one that kept the tanager's size but whose phenotype retained most of the finch's colors. Our welcome visitor looked at us and our clean picnic table for perhaps eight or nine slow-ticking seconds, body still except for the quick dartings of his eyes, then took flight across the camp road, over the outhouse and out of sight. He didn't come back the rest of the evening.
Another first for our journals. We had been favored with fairly good views of male Western Tanagers in every national park we camped in, except Redwood.
But none of them had flown into camp, and none of them had perched at the head of the table and offered us the continuance of their beauty for a tidbit of food. In all of the state and national parks from the north rim of the Grand Canyon through Sequoia and Kings Canyon, Yosemite and Redwood, all of the avian campground mooches had been the usual suspects: those raucously aggressive corvids-American Crow, Common Raven, Steller's Jay, and Gray Jay at Lassen. The most common, comical, and persistent of the corvid mooches were the Steller's Jays, who tilted their jaunty crests this way and that way as they sidled in closer and closer to an open bag of crackers, who all but said, "you going to eat that."
The male tanager who sat beside us was probably at least partially habituated to sweet and salty camper snacks, but his appearance at our picnic table had come as a complete and serendipitous surprise. The next day I asked a few people-nearby campers, the campground host, a ranger monitoring camp occupancy-if they had seen or heard of this kind of behavior from a Western Tanager. Everyone in the small sample said no. Whatever the reason for the tanager's presence, we were grateful for the few moments of his improbable grace, and grateful to share our rented table-and the Earth-with a bird of such beauty.
Notes
In the United States, the Western Tanager breeds in coniferous forests west of the Great Plains. The north-south sweep of its breeding range spans from a little north of British Columbia and Alberta in Canada all the way down the mountainous western U.S. to the Mexican border. The colors of this 7¼-inch songbird are immediately distinctive; the entire bird, from its orange-red crown to its black tail tip, is one continuous field mark. If you get a good look at a breeding-plumage male, you will be able to identify the species with bird guide, bird app, google inquiry, etc.
The ornithological authorities have formally changed the perfectly descriptive name of the Gray Jay to Canada Jay. The Corvid family bird formerly known as the Gray Jay, which was formerly named Canada Jay, is now officially reknown and renamed as the Canada Jay.
This fluffy and uncrested jay-long tailed and small billed-is also informally known as camp robber, venison hawk, and whiskey jack. The Canada Jay swoops ever so silently into camp and helps itself to leftover and left-out morsels of food. Then the bird glues tidbits of food to the branches and trunks of trees using its super-sticky saliva. These trees become cold-storage pantries for future use during the deep freeze of far-north winters.
*Modest-sized Lassen Volcanic, approximately 106,372 acres, is the least crowded of California's major national parks.
