Painted Bunting
- Family
- Cardinalidae
- In Mexico
- Special protection (NOM‑059) 9
Where and when to see the Painted Bunting
DraftOn the Yucatán Peninsula
In winter it lives in scrubby second growth, overgrown pastures, forest edges and weedy fields. It is shy and keeps to dense cover: watch for movement near the ground and listen for its metallic chip; it sometimes visits seed feeders.
Where it’s reported most
- Cuxtal Ecological ReserveMérida, Yucatán
- Punta Sur, CozumelCozumel, Quintana Roo
- Ría LagartosRío Lagartos, Yucatán
- Kabah Ecological ParkBenito Juárez, Quintana Roo
When
From October to April
Reported from October to April.
Reports relative to effort
- January: 95%
- February: 85%
- March: 97%
- April: 100%
- May: 7%
- June: 0%
- July: 0%
- August: 1%
- September: 5%
- October: 37%
- November: 62%
- December: 79%
Data: eBird and other datasets via GBIF.org (CC BY 4.0), 2015–2026 · Base map: Natural Earth
Winters on the peninsula in good numbers, feeding on seeds along brushy edges, weedy fields and coastal scrub. Despite their colours, males are shy and keep low in cover.
- Identification
- The male is unmistakable: deep blue head, green back, and red throat, underparts and rump. Females and young are a bright, even green, a truer green than other small songbirds, with a pale ring around the eye.
- Voice
- The song is a quick, two-second string of thin, sweet, high notes. Its call is a soft “plik” or a metallic chip.
What the photo doesn’t show
DraftNot every green one is female
A green bunting isn’t always a female. Young males keep a female-like green plumage through their first year and only put on the full blue, red and green in their second autumn. Without a close look they are hard to tell from females. 1,2
Bringing the seeds down
In winter it eats mostly seeds, low down or on the ground. It may fly up to grab a grass stem, pull it down and pin it under one foot while it picks out the seeds. Away from its breeding grounds it often joins small flocks of other seed-eaters. 3,4
A stopover to moult
Western birds do something rare for a songbird: they stop partway through their autumn migration, in southern Arizona, Sonora and northern Sinaloa, to replace their feathers, and only then continue south. Eastern birds molt before they leave. 1,5
Caged for its colours
Its colours make it a prized cage bird. From the mid-1970s to the early 1980s nearly 15,000 a year were exported from Mexico, and in 2013 it was still on sale in Mexico City markets. 5,6
Sources
- Birds of the World (Cornell Lab): Painted Bunting (opens in a new tab)
- Wikipedia: Painted bunting (opens in a new tab)
- All About Birds (Cornell Lab): Painted Bunting life history (opens in a new tab)
- Animal Diversity Web: Passerina ciris (opens in a new tab)
- All About Birds (Cornell Lab): Painted Bunting (opens in a new tab)
- Contina et al. 2019, Ibis 161: 372 (opens in a new tab)
- BirdLife International, Data Zone: Painted Bunting (opens in a new tab)
- IUCN Red List category, via GBIF: Passerina ciris (opens in a new tab)
- DOF, 14/11/2019: NOM-059-SEMARNAT-2010, Anexo III (opens in a new tab)
Map and months: 4,549 records from 2015–2026 from eBird, iNaturalist, and others, via GBIF.org (CC BY 4.0), in 0.1° squares (about 10 km). eBird: doi.org/10.15468/aomfnb.
Months: the species’ records ÷ all bird records that month, scaled to the busiest month. It allows for birding effort; it is not the chance of seeing it. A blank square: few or no reports, not necessarily absent.
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