Scarlet Tanager song and call

A Scarlet Tanager sounds like an American Robin with a sore throat: the same rhythm of short, rising and falling phrases with pauses between them, but every note is hoarse, burry and a little hurried, as if the singer had a cold. It comes from high in the canopy of mature oak woods from May into July. The call is the better clue, an emphatic two-part chip-burr, the first note sharp and the second lower and rolled. Learn that call and you will find far more tanagers than your eyes ever will.

What the song sounds like

The song is a short series of burry, two-syllable phrases, each sliding up or down, delivered in a quick, steady rhythm and then repeated after a pause. Written out it looks like querit, queer, query, querit, queer. The structure is almost exactly a robin's: a handful of short phrases, a breath, a handful more. The difference is the voice. Where the robin is clear and whistled, the tanager is hoarse, as though sung through a comb and tissue paper, and the phrases run a little faster.

Because the pattern is so robin-like, most people walk under singing tanagers for years without knowing it. The trick is to stop whenever you hear a robin in tall oaks in late spring and check the tone. Males sing from high in the canopy, usually out of sight among the leaves, and they sing most in the first weeks after arrival in May, when they are setting up territory and waiting for the females, who arrive a few days to a week later. Females sing too, a softer, less harsh version, when answering a mate or while gathering nest material.

The call: chip-burr

The call note is a sharp, nasal, two-part chip-burr or chick-burr, the first syllable higher and shorter, the second lower and rolled. It is distinctive, easy to remember, and given all summer long, well after the song has faded, so it is the sound that tells you there are tanagers in a wood in July and August. Both sexes give it, often when a person or a jay comes too close to the nest.

When and where you hear it

Scarlet Tanagers breed across the eastern United States and southeastern Canada, from the Plains states east to the Atlantic and from the Great Lakes south into the mountains of the Carolinas and Georgia. They winter in the foothills of the Andes in northwestern South America and travel between the two at night, most of them straight across the Gulf of Mexico. The first males reach Missouri and Tennessee around mid-April, arrive across the North in mid-May to early June, and the last birds leave in mid-October. Migration peaks in mid-May and again in mid-September, when a wave of greenish fall birds can turn up in any park with big trees.

The breeding habitat is mature deciduous forest, especially oak, though maple, beech, hickory and mixed pine-oak woods all hold them. They are birds of the interior, not the edge. Studies put the minimum viable woodlot at roughly 25 to 30 acres, and in small fragments nests fail to Brown-headed Cowbirds and to jays, crows, grackles, squirrels and raccoons at rates that can exceed two thirds. A pair raises one brood a year and will not try again if the first nest is lost. The female builds a shallow, flimsy cup on a horizontal branch 20 to 30 feet up, well out from the trunk, and lays about four pale blue-green eggs that hatch in 12 to 14 days.

They feed slowly and deliberately in the treetops on caterpillars, moths, beetles, wasps and bees, sometimes hovering to pick prey off a leaf or flying out to snap it from the air, and they rake stinging insects along a branch before swallowing them. In late summer they add mulberries, elderberries and other soft fruit. Numbers are stable across much of the range and have risen in some states since the 1960s, but only where big forest remains. On a still May morning in an oak ridge, Warble will usually hear one before you can find it.

What it looks like

A stocky, thick-billed songbird about 7 inches long with an 11.5-inch wingspan, weighing around an ounce. The spring male is the one bird nobody forgets: an intense, deep scarlet body with jet-black wings and tail, redder than a cardinal and with none of the cardinal's crest. The female is olive-yellow below and greener above with darker wings and a pale bill, and she moves so sluggishly through the leaves that she is easy to pass over. After nesting the male molts into the female's yellow-green but keeps his black wings and tail, and for a few weeks in August he is a patchwork of scarlet and olive. Since 2009 the tanagers of this group have been placed in the cardinal family rather than with the tropical tanagers.

Birds that sound similar

• 
  American Robin

  The robin sings the same rhythm of short phrases with pauses, but every note is clear and whistled. If the phrases sound rough, hoarse or buzzy, it is the tanager. Robins also sing from open perches; tanagers stay hidden in the canopy.

• 
  Summer Tanager

  The Summer Tanager's song is also robin-like but slower, clearer and less nasal, with only three or four different phrases repeated over and over. Its call is a stuttering pit-i-tuck, not a two-part chip-burr.

• 
  Rose-breasted Grosbeak

  The Rose-breasted Grosbeak sings a richer, sweeter, more flowing version of a robin's song from the same eastern woods. It is smooth where the tanager is hoarse, and its call is a single sharp squeak.

Where the Scarlet Tanager card lives

In Warble the same bird can be an easy card in one state and a prized one in another, because each album ranks its birds by how often people really report them there. The Scarlet Tanager appears in 17 state albums:

Questions people ask

Written by the Warble team from the sources above. Updated September 30, 2026.