Western Tanager, Sandy Hook, 7 October

From Peter Dorosh of the Brooklyn Bird Club comes this report of a female Western Tanager. It was seen in the early afternoon Saturday 10/7 near the Observation Platform at the north end of Sandy Hook, Monmouth Co. Here are the details he forwarded:

While eating our lunch on the platform Eric noticed an odd looking tanager. He was certain that it was a tanager only it appeared to have wingbars. We searched for the bird but, when we couldn't relocate it, gave up and walked the Fisherman's Trail down to the beach.

On the return from the beach we stopped and sat and rested in the shade of a tree where the trail begins to ascend towards the intersection of the observation platform trail. I'm not sure who noticed it first but someone called the groups attention to a tanager in the tree tops in front of us. My first view was of the head of a pale yellow tanager with an unusually orange bill. As the bird came out into the open I could see that it had a pale yellow throat, white belly and pale yellow undertail coverts. Over the next fifteen minutes or so we watched the bird fairly close to us. It would fly from the stand of trees between our group and the Observation Platform trail and the Beachplum and other low shrubs at the edge of the trail. The bird had well defined pale wingbars and, when it perched in the low shrubs, we saw an obvious pale gray mantle contrasting with a yellow rump and uppertail coverts. The gray back was also very visible as it flew back and forth between the trees and shrubs. At one point, when the bird was hidden in the shrubs, it made a soft rattling sound, as opposed to the "chip-brr" call one would expect from a Scarlet Tanager. After noting all the aforementioned field marks we came to the conclusion that the bird was a pale adult female Western Tanager. In addition to the birders in our group there were two other birders walking past that got good looks at the tanager. We left when the bird flew towards the wooded area that borders a row of nearby homes. We alerted another group of birders of the sighting, hopefully they were able to locate the bird.