Educate Yourself About the Painted Bunting and Other Buntings
Painted Bunting
The Painted Bunting has a bill that is slightly longer then other buntings, a red eye-ring, violet-blue on its head, green on the back, red underparts, and a red rump. Its length is 5 in (13cm) Its wingspan is 8in (20cm) Its voice is a sweet high-pitched, tinkling musical song, and its notes are a sharp “chip”. Their eggs are white or light blue with brown speckles at the large end, they can have up to 4 clutches per year, but 2 are more common, and each clutch has 3-5 eggs. The female will sit on the eggs for about 11 -12 days, and fledging time is 12-14 days. Both male and female feed their young. The female is bright green.
The Painted Bunting will probably take first place in a “colorful plumage” contest, and they are very active birds, even on hot summer days when all the other birds are quiet and resting, you can hear them singing away.
The Louisiana-to-Texas population winters south to panama, and the East Coast population nests from North Carolina to Florida, winters in south Florida, the Bahamas, Cuba and Jamaica. The Painted Bunting is on the “Audubon Watch list”, (a list of species with great conservation risk), because of its constant annual declining, at a rate of 2.7 percent, between the years of 1966 until 2000. The reason for this is the loss of habitat, disease, and worse, from being captured from their winter homes, like the Bahamas, Cuba, Panama, and Jamaica in the songbird trade. Thousands of Painted Buntings are also captured in Mexico, and sold overseas.
The biggest treat is though, the loss of shrubby habitats, and the appearance of Brown-headed Cowbirds, and their accompanying parasitism, in the East Coast region. The Painted Buntings diet consists of tiny seeds of bristle grass, dandelion, smartweed and goldenrod and during the breading season they feed their young ones, crickets, wasps, grasshoppers, boll weevils, caterpillars, and flies.
The female witch is the only completely green finch found in North America, will build an open-cup nest from dried grass, weed-stems, and leaves, lined with fine grass, hair or even snake skin.The male Painted Bunting will sing from the tree tops, and is known to be very aggressive in defending his nesting territory. Sometimes the fights between the males can turn bloody, even lead to the demise of one bunting.
If you like to attract buntings to your backyard or lovely bird feeding garden you need to plant shrubby hedgerows, like elderberries and raspberries, or a row of perennial sunflowers, will make the buntings feel at home. Fill your hanging bird feeders or bird feeding tables with white millet and some other mixed seeds. Remember not to do any ground feeding if there are cats living nearby, and do not forget to put out water, in a birdbath or in an easy to make, homemade one. Visit our section on DRINKING AND BATHING HABITS at our website www.BIRDFEEDERSUSA.com to learn more.
