“Come quick! There is a new bird at the feeder!”
When my wife Nancy spoke those words, I came-a runnin’. For us birders, there is nothing more exciting than to see a visitor in your back yard.
Picking sunflower hearts from the feeder were two beautiful Indigo Buntings, the first I can ever remember seeing in our yard.
They stayed for a while, then left, and I haven’t seen them since. I suppose they were just travelling through.
The interesting thing is that my friend Leah Leffler told me just earlier in the week that she had seen Indigo Buntings in her yard. The Leffler’s live on the south side of town and I am about five or six miles north, so perhaps a flock was moving or migrating through.
Leah and I saw solid blue, male Indigo Buntings, but there may have been females close by and we didn’t recognize them. Females are a plain brown with a faint blue streak on their breasts, wings and tail and a patch of white at the throat.
Buntings are short, stocky birds, slightly larger than a sparrow. Their preferred habitat is weedy, brushy areas, especially on the edges of woods and trees.
I understand that they have two broods per year with an average of three or four eggs per nest. The female does almost all the work, searching for food and tending to the chicks.
Males arrive near the nesting grounds first and attract their mates by singing love ballads high in the treetops. Sometimes males will have a harem within the same territory, which is why the females carry the bulk of the workload.
The Indigo Bunting’s diet is made up mostly of seeds and insects, especially spiders. The young are fed a diet almost exclusively of insects. In winter, when bugs are scarce, the beautiful blue birds eat seeds. They were eating sunflower hearts at my feeder, a universal food for most every bird.
The Audubon Society says there are likely more Indigo Buntings here now than when the pilgrims landed. I sure would like to see them again in my back yard.