A Yellow Cardinalid

Sure, its official English name is Scarlet Tanager, but this species isn’t “really” a tanager at all, and only adult males in alternate plumage are “scarlet.” The rest of the time–and all year ’round in the case of females–these handsome woodland grosbeaks are a pleasing leafy olive, letting them go more often than not unnoticed in the dense treetops they prefer.

The specific epithet assigned this bird, olivacea, reflects that fact. Gmelin based his 1789 description of the species (calling it Tanagra olivacea) on Latham’s Olive Tanager, the description of which is clearly that of a juvenile Scarlet Tanager, wings bars and all. Both authors took birds in this plumage, along with females and basic-plumaged individuals of either sex, to be distinct from their “Red Tanager,” which we now recognize as simply the alternate male Scarlet Tanager.

Unfortunately, by the time the identity of these green birds with the black-winged red males was recognized, the scientific epithet rubra (meaning, of course, “scarlet”) was already occupied–by the Summer Tanager, which Linnaeus had named Fringilla rubra in the authoritative Tenth Edition of the Systema naturae. To make matters even more confusing, Gmelin’s name had somehow been forgotten, and so for the first three quarters of a century of the AOU Check-list, our Scarlet Tanager went under Vieillot’s eminently sensible but later name erythromelas–black and red.

Not until 1919 did Harry Oberholser make the first effort to resurrect Gmelin’s neglected name, and not until 1957 did Piranga olivacea finally appear in an edition of the Check-list.

As an amusing aside, the recent reassignment of these non-tanagers to the family Cardinalidae would have come as no surprise to some early ornithologists: in 1760, Brisson calls the bird “le cardinal de Canada” in his French text, and Cardinalis canadensis in the accompanying Latin translation. What goes around comes around.