Summer Tanager song and call

A Summer Tanager sounds like an American Robin that has taken singing lessons: a series of slurred, whistled phrases, rising and falling, softer and sweeter than a robin's and more repetitive, often built from only three or four phrases and lasting two to four seconds. The call is the easier clue, a dry, sharp, rattling pit-i-tuck or pik-i-tuk-i-tuk with the accent on the first note, delivered from high in an oak or pine where the all-red male is surprisingly hard to see.

What the song sounds like

The song is a string of whistled, slurred phrases, some rising and some falling, delivered from the top of a tree. The phrasing and rhythm are robin-like, but the tone is softer, sweeter and cleaner. It is also more monotonous. Where a robin cycles through many phrases, a Summer Tanager may use as few as three or four distinct units and repeat them, and a single song runs about two to four seconds before a pause and another round. The voice is rich and musical, never buzzy or hoarse.

Males sing from the canopy through the breeding season and will counter-sing with a neighbor, each answering the other across the property line. Females occasionally sing too, a garbled version of the male's song. Because the birds sing high in the leaves and sit still between moves, the song is often the only sign of one.

The call: pit-i-tuck

The call is a dry, sharp, staccato pit-i-tuck, also written pi-tuk, pik-i-tuk-i-tuk or chick-tucky-tuck, with the accent on the first note and a rattling, clicking quality. It is loud and distinctive, given in agitation when a jay or a hawk comes too close and as a contact note between the pair and their fledglings. For most birders it is how Summer Tanagers get found: hear the pit-i-tuck, then scan the treetops for red or yellow.

When and where you hear it

Summer Tanagers breed across the southern United States, from Florida and the Carolinas west through Texas and north to about Iowa and New Jersey, and again along cottonwood and willow rivers in the Southwest. In the East they favor dry, open woods of oak, hickory and pine, bottomlands and wooded parks. They winter from central Mexico through Central America to Bolivia and Brazil, migrating at night, some straight across the Gulf of Mexico.

In Missouri they are present from May through the first week of October, common in the southern two-thirds of the state and uncommon farther north. The nest is a loose, shallow cup of grass, weed stems, bark and leaves built by the female on a horizontal branch well out from the trunk, usually ten to thirty-five feet up. Three or four pale green or blue eggs, spotted with brown, are incubated by the female for eleven or twelve days; both parents feed the young, which leave the nest after eight to twelve days.

Bees and wasps are the main summer food, caught in flight high in the trees and whacked against a branch to kill them and rub off the stinger, and a tanager will harass a wasp nest until the adults abandon it, then eat the larvae. Beetles, cicadas, caterpillars and grasshoppers round it out, with mulberries and blackberries in late summer. The population is about 12 million and steady overall, with declines along the lower Colorado River.

What it looks like

A robin-sized songbird, about seven inches long with an eleven-inch wingspan and a large, pale, thick bill. The adult male is rosy red from head to tail, slightly darker on the wings, with no crest and no black mask, which separates him from a Northern Cardinal at a glance, and none of the black wings of a Scarlet Tanager. He keeps the red all year. The female is a rich yellow with olive on the back and wings, more orange-toned and less green than a female Scarlet Tanager; check the plain wings and heavy pale bill. Young males in their first spring are blotched with red and yellow. The red comes from pigments in the diet.

Birds that sound similar

• 
  American Robin

  The robin's caroling, cheer-up, cheerily, is louder, rougher and more varied, and usually comes from a lawn or a low tree. The tanager is softer and sweeter, uses fewer phrases and stays in the canopy.

• 
  Scarlet Tanager

  The Scarlet Tanager sings a hurried, burry, hoarse version of the same robin-like warble, as if it had a cold, and its call is an emphatic, nasal two-note chip. The Summer Tanager is clear-voiced and its call rattles.

• 
  Rose-breasted Grosbeak

  The grosbeak's song is also a softer, more melodious robin, so go by the call: a sharp, penetrating, metallic eek, nothing like the tanager's dry pit-i-tuck.

Where the Summer 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 Summer Tanager appears in 15 state albums:

Questions people ask

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