![\"Screenshot](\"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/Screenshot-2014-05-15-13.11.37.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThis year, it’s the “orange variant” of the\u00a0Scarlet Tanager\u00a0<\/strong>that has the internet abuzz. I can’t turn the machine on any more without reading about this “form,” and there is an abundance of photographic material out there purporting to show such individuals. Just google it<\/a>.<\/p>\n There is no doubt that some males of this species in definitive alternate plumage\u00a0are less scarlet than others; have a look at Larry Sansone’s photograph of a decidedly ochre-toned individual in Beadle and Rising’s\u00a0Photographic Guide<\/em><\/a>, for example. Rising comments that this bird falls notably towards the orange end of “the scale”; the implication is, correctly and appropriately, that there is a more or less continuous range of color to be observed, from the dull orange of some males to the classic blazing red of others.<\/p>\n Yes, they vary: They vary “considerably,” in the authoritative words of Robert Ridgway<\/a>, “being sometimes of a flame-scarlet or almost orange hue.” But that doesn’t mean there is any definable “variant” among them, any more than there is an identifiable “yellow variant” of the\u00a0American Robin\u00a0<\/strong>or the\u00a0Summer Tanager<\/strong> — two other species in which the reddish parts of males’ plumage can differ in brightness and saturation.<\/p>\n When most of us see a dull adult male\u00a0Scarlet Tanager<\/strong>, we’re delighted and intrigued, and tend to say something like “Why, look, there’s a dull adult male Scarlet Tanager!” without elevating that individual bird to the status of “variant.”<\/p>\n Most of the photos being posted to the internet<\/a> now, though, are not of adult tanagers at all. Image after image of these “orange variants” shows a first-alternate male\u00a0Scarlet Tanager,\u00a0<\/strong>readily aged by the molt limits in the wing. And many of those birds are indeed duller orange-red than the name “scarlet” might suggest.<\/p>\n Entirely as expected.<\/p>\n BNA<\/a> tells us that first-alternate males are “orange-red to scarlet.” Dwight<\/a> describes them as “sometimes pale or mixed with orange.” It’s simply normal — for lack of a better word — for some ten-month-old male\u00a0Scarlet Tanagers\u00a0<\/strong>to be orangish.<\/p>\n Where did the need to assign these birds to a class of “variants” come from? The obvious answer is provided by a painting in the first edition of the Sibley guide, a dull tanager captioned “variant adult male breeding.”<\/p>\n In a process of productive misreading, Sibley’s perfectly unexceptionable adjective “variant” — meaning “different” — has apparently come to be re-analyzed as the tendentious noun “variant,” a definable kind departing from the normal, a “morph<\/a>.” But what the guide is describing, and what birders are observing, is simply individual variation, with some birds more orange, some birds more scarlet, some birds more yellow.<\/p>\n I’m not suggesting that we stop looking close at male Scarlet Tanagers<\/strong>, and I’m not suggesting that anyone stop “posting” photos of particularly bright or particularly dull or otherwise remarkable birds. But when we encounter a bird that strikes us as oddly colored, maybe we should remember that variation doesn’t always make a variant.<\/p>\n
![\"SCarlet](\"https:\/\/farm8.staticflickr.com\/7298\/8734920455_54c39c51f7_z.jpg\")
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