Painted Bunting
Passerina ciris
Compiled by Niyati Acharya

Female Painted Buntings have a distinctive bright green with a pale eyering. They are songbirds and breed in the coastal Southeast and in the south-central U.S., where they are caught and sold illegally as cage birds, a practice that puts pressure on their breeding populations.  Painted Buntings eat seeds, particularly after the breeding season is over, starting in midsummer.  The oldest recorded wild Painted Bunting was at least 12 years old, as reported from a Florida banding study.

Males and females are easily distinguished.  Males sport bright blue heads, green backs, and a red throat, and chest. Females and juvenile birds are a bright green. All painted buntings have stubby and thick bills and pale eye rings. They reach five and a half inches, about the size of a sparrow or a finch. Their wings are rounded, and they have rounded, notched and square-tipped tails.

There are two distinct breeding populations of Painted Buntings, an eastern population, and a western population. The western population is in the south-central U.S. and northern Mexico including Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Kansas and Missouri. The eastern population ranges along the Atlantic Coast from North Carolina to central Florida.

Painted buntings from the eastern breeding population likely winter in Florida and the northwestern Caribbean.  Those from the western breeding population winter more broadly throughout Mexico and Central America.  Unlike most songbirds, the Painted Bunting’s western population begins its fall migration before molting (shedding of old feathers so they can be replaced by new feathers), molts in staging areas in northern Mexico, then continues to migrate south.  This migration-molt pattern is common among waterfowl, but it is rare among songbirds.  In contrast to the western population, the eastern population of Painted Buntings molts on its breeding grounds before fall migration.

Male Painted Buntings will fight vigorously to protect their territory during the breeding season. While courting female buntings during spring, males spread their colorful feathers resembling a tiny male turkey.  A female indicates her interest by pecking at the ground. After the breeding season, Painted Buntings may become more social, sometimes forming small groups with other buntings, or joining larger groups that may include other species of seed-eating birds such as sparrows and finches.

For most of the year, Painted Buntings eat seeds, and they prefer white millet.  During the breeding season, they feast on insects.  Identifying genes influenced by natural selection can provide information about lineage-specific adaptations, and transcriptomes generated by next-generation sequencing are a useful resource for identifying such genes.

Populations of Painted Bunting on the Atlantic coast and interior southern United States are known to be allopatric during the breeding season.  Using genomic and morphological data from museum specimens and banded birds, researchers found evidence of three genetically differentiated painted bunting populations with distinct wintering ranges and molt-migration phenologies.  

Populations breeding in Louisiana winter on the Yucatán Peninsula are parapatric with other interior populations that winter in mainland Mexico and Central America.  Across the interior breeding range, genetic ancestry is associated with variation in wing length, suggesting that selection may be promoting morphological divergence in populations with different migration strategies.

Sources include: Allaboutbirds.org, fws.gov, Nih.gov

Photo credit:  Susan Young,  Burton, Robert H./USFWS,  Kenny Seals/USFWS, Rick Cantu/USFWS