Indigo Bunting

Indigo Bunting

(Entry #4) My assistant photographer, Emily, said I should do a post on Passerina cyanea, a bird which once I thought almost mythical in northeastern Oklahoma. They are also in the cardinal family, along with the tanagers, Cardinalidae. ​

Indigo buntings are a beautiful blue color, and a long time ago I really wanted to see one, and if you wait until they come to Oklahoma for breeding (April-May) then you will probably get one eventually. Their wings fade into a black color.

Honestly they are a lot more common than I believed. I saw one a couple years ago, in early April. I saw another that Emily and I could not agree on the coloration of (I'll get to that in a moment), and another which I have my only photographs of, such as the one above. More have since been taken by various photographers.

Now, there is a problem in identifying these, some phenomenon I think I referred to in my last post, right? The reason I could not agree with Emily was not because we were wrong about what color it was, it was because we saw it in two different colors. I have noticed that I misidentified these as blue grosbeaks twice now. Apparently they appear in a much darker blue to me. 

Now, how do you tell them apart from a blue grosbeak, then? They are both very similar in appearance; really the only way is the brown/red on their wings. They are both North American buntings, which presents a second problem: this is a problem called by its scientific name, Passerina caerula x cyanea. This is our problems combined, blue grosbeak x indigo bunting, a mix between the two! Now I've actually never seen this mix, nor an actual blue grosbeak, so I cannot verify this information. 

As an observation, I have never seen them in an oak or other tree similar. 

They make a frequent chirping noise, very similar to sparrows. I have not observed either a female nor a juvenile, only male indigo buntings. This is the case with too many birds. 

They don't eat other birds, I can tell you that. 

I hope I get some more updates on these soon enough, and I hope my oriole attraction project works. The lemons don't seem to be working. Hopefully the oranges I stuck through some branches will work. Anyway, I should post tomorrow! Maybe not, though, either I'll be taking too many pictures of birds to write informative things about them, or else I'll be launch some sort of cardboard space shuttle.