Dead Birds in a Baggie

Today I went to someone's house on the fringes of Elmira and picked up a ziploc baggie with two dead birds in it. All in a day's work. Why would I want a bag of dead birds? Well sometimes people call with interesting birds that have hit their windows and we stuff them and put them in our "forest" in the museum. Kind of morbid, but true. Both of the birds I picked up are rare-ish migratory songbirds, and not very many people have a license to have the birds, even dead. We do. It's called a License to Possess Dead Material (or something like that). I was excited about these two particular birds because people don't see them very often, especially the pretty red one. No, it wasn't a cardinal, it was a Scarlet Tanager (Piranga olivacea). Scarlet Tnaagers are fewer in number these days because they are sensitive to habitat fragmentation and they are also not seen much because they tend to be a secretive forest canopy bird even where they are found commonly. Tanagers are only here in the summer for breeding then they travel back to their wintering grounds which are from Panama to the mid section of South America.

The other bird was an Indigo Bunting (Passerina cyanea). Also a pretty bird, but brilliant blue of course, not red. They are a little more common than Tanagers and are birds of fields and edges. They also are here only in the summer for breeding, then travel (at night during the late summer and early fall) South to lower Florida and central Mexico southward through the Caribbean and Central America to northern South America.

Thanks to the woman with bad bird luck, these beautiful but unlucky neotropical migrants will be ambassadors for their species in Tanglewood's exhibit hall after they pay a visit to our taxidermist.