Western tanager

It's a colorful male western tanager in a thicket near our home in western Oregon on Wednesday, May 9, 2018. According to the super cool Cornell Lab of Ornithology, while most red birds owe their redness to a variety of plant pigments known as carotenoids, the Western Tanager gets its scarlet head feathers from a rare pigment called rhodoxanthin. Unable to make this substance in their own bodies, Western Tanagers probably obtain it from insects in their diet.