When early naturalists began classifying North American birds, Kaufman tells me, they slapped the sparrow, finch, or bunting label willy-nilly on just about any species with a thickish bill that looked good for cracking seeds, since that’s what such birds were called back in the Old World. “And they don’t look nearly as cool as our buntings,” he says. Some of these species, such as Little Bunting and Rustic Bunting, occasionally stray into Alaska, but none are resident to North America. The birds first referred to as buntings, Kaufman explains, were European species from the genus Emberiza. Before we could delve into why these birds are so extraordinary, though, we first had to address another question: What is a bunting, anyway?Īs with many questions of taxonomy, the answer is slipperier than you might think. So I called up Kenn Kaufman, renowned avian expert and Audubon field editor. Like any self-respecting bird journalist, I felt duty-bound to look into it. What, I wondered, is going on with buntings? Why are they all so good? And jeez, could you imagine hiking some desert Southwest canyon and stumbling across a Varied Bunting in its hues of mixed-berry jam? Then I envisioned the more subdued but no less lovely palette of the Lazuli Bunting that graces the West. On the walk home I thought with envy of the Southeastern birders who regularly encounter absurdly beautiful Painted Buntings. And yet, on a morning when we saw grosbeaks, orioles, and an embarrassment of spellbinding warblers, the consensus held that a highlight of the morning-maybe the highlight-was that brilliant bunting. It wasn’t a lifer for any of the folks I was birding with. While it was a treat to spot this bird in Manhattan, seeing an Indigo Bunting isn’t exactly difficult they’re among the most common songbirds in the East. I raised my binoculars, tweaked the focus, and there it was: an Indigo Bunting. It does not store any personal data.One spring morning, scanning the treetops in Central Park, I spotted a smear of ultramarine against the paler blue of the sky. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance". This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
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