A bonus sighting

Nature, in her blind search for life,
has filled every possible cranny of the earth
with some sort of fantastic creature.

Joseph Wood Krutch

I was excited on Thursday to see a pair of Western Tanagers out in the holly tree. The female was dull-colored, but you couldn't miss the brilliant male. I screamed loudly for John to "come upstairs quick" and have a look. When I saw the single male the other day I assumed he was just passing through on his way up to Canada, and would look for a wife when he got there.

Well, that would be a small miracle if this pair migrated from Central America to spend the summer in our corner of Seattle. For those of you living out in the countryside surrounded by all sorts of colorful birds, it might be hard to understand our thrill seeing such an exotic, tropical creature right in the city.

Western Tanager nest

I looked up their mating behavior on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology website, and if they are hanging around it may be easy to spot the messy nest. For such splendid looking birds, they don't seem to put much effort into housekeeping:

The Tanager Nest is a flimsy, shallow open cup of twigs, grasses, bark strips, and rootlets, lined with grass, hair, or fine plant fibers. Placed in trees on top of branch well out from trunk.

Hair. Sometimes when I clean my brush in the bathroom, I'll throw the hairball out the window. I have no idea why I do this weird thing, except something my German Grandma said once about hair and bird nests. I can't seem to remember if it was good or bad. When I was young I remember her throwing hair in the wood stove and watching it burn up. So pitching it out the window may just be an act of childish defiance. But who knows, some of my gray hair might actually wind up in a Tanager nest?