BirdNote; Three Buntings - Indigo, Lazuli, and Painted

BirdNote®

Three Buntings

Written by Bob Sundstrom

This is BirdNote.

[Indigo Bunting song]

Each spring and summer, Indigo Buntings sing their buzzy, jumbled songs from brushy edges throughout the Eastern US. [Indigo Bunting song] The sparkling blue males, are one of the best known and most colorful birds of the region.

[Indigo Bunting song]

West of the Rockies, a different bunting, a Lazuli Bunting, sings his song. [Lazuli Bunting song] He’s named for the gemstone lapis lazuli, and his head and back shimmer an iridescent azure. Together with a red-orange breast and bold white wing patches, he looks like he might have been fashioned by a maker of Navajo jewelry.

[Lazuli Bunting song]

Yet another bunting sings atop thickets and shrubs in the Southeast and South-central US. [Painted Bunting song] And if the first two buntings – Indigo and Lazuli – are avian gems, many would equate this third bunting, the Painted Bunting, with the Crown Jewels. [Painted Bunting song] A male Painted Bunting, with a bold blue head, ruby-red breast, and a back of burnished apple green, is one of the most dramatically colorful birds you’ll see in all of North America.

[Painted Bunting song]

Enjoy the bunting singing in your neck of the woods this summer, for with the arrival of fall, Indigo [Indigo Bunting song], Lazuli, [Lazuli Bunting song] and Painted, too, [Painted Bunting song] will be gone to the tropics until next spring.

Writers for BirdNote include Bob Sundstrom, Todd Peterson, Dennis Paulson, and Ellen Blackstone. I’m Mary McCann.

[Indigo Bunting in background]

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Sounds of the birds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Indigo Bunting 73948 recorded by G.A. Keller; Lazuli Bunting 111055 by T.G. Sander; Painted Bunting 105245 by G.A. Keller.

Producer: John Kessler

Executive Producer: Chris Peterson

© 2012 Tune In to Nature.org June 2017 Narrator: Mary McCann

ID# bunting-01-2012-06-03