All species › Passerines › Cardinals and allies › Indigo Bunting
Position in the tree Birds Aves › Birds with a flexible palate Neognathae › All other modern birds Neoaves › Landbirds Telluraves › Falcons, parrots and passerines Australaves › Falcons and passerines Eufalconimorphae › Parrots and passerines Psittacopasserae
Indigo Bunting | Passerina cyanea
Indigogors | Azulillo índigo
The Indigo Bunting is a small bunting whose male is entirely bright blue in the breeding season. It breeds in eastern North America. In the guide area it is a numerous winter visitor and passage migrant that searches for seeds in small flocks in weedy fields, grasslands and field edges. Most birds are brown in winter.
Voice
The song is a lively, high series of clear notes, mostly in pairs, roughly sweet sweet chew chew sweet sweet; in the guide area heard mainly in spring. The call is a dry, sharp spit, the flight call a buzzy zzeet.
Recording: Rory Nefdt — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
12–13 cm. Conical grey bill with a paler lower mandible. The breeding male is entirely bright indigo blue, with a darker, purplish-blue head, blackish lores and blackish wings and tail with blue edges. In winter plumage the male is brown with scattered blue feathers, especially on the wings and tail; in spring a mottled brown-and-blue plumage develops. The female is uniform warm brown, paler below, with faint streaks on the breast, two indistinct buffy wing bars and often a blue tinge on the rump and tail edges.
Confusion species
The female Lazuli Bunting Passerina amoena is greyer brown with an unstreaked buffy breast and more distinct pale wing bars. Blue Grosbeak Passerina caerulea is larger, with a heavy bill and broad rufous wing bars. The female Varied Bunting Passerina versicolor is plain grey-brown without breast streaks. Blue Bunting Cyanocompsa parellina is a resident of dense undergrowth with a thicker, blackish bill; the female is unstreaked warm brown.
Habitat
In winter open and semi-open country with seeding weeds and grasses: weedy fields, savanna, grassland with shrubs, pastures, field edges, rice fields, forest edges and overgrown clearings, also gardens; mostly below 1500 m. Outside the breeding season it lives in small flocks, sometimes with other seed-eaters.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of Mexico and Central America.
Range and movements
Breeds in eastern North America, from southern Canada to the Gulf Coast, and locally in the south-western United States. Winters from central and southern Mexico, mainly on the Caribbean slope and the Yucatán Peninsula, through Central America to Panama, in the Antilles and in small numbers in northern South America. On migration also elsewhere in eastern Mexico.
- Winter visitor (c. Oct–Mar)
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
In winter often in small flocks in weedy fields and along fields and roadsides; in March and April males in mottled blue-and-brown transitional plumage can be seen.
Conservation status
Not threatened (LC). Numerous and widespread; the breeding population in North America is large, although slowly declining.
Scientific name
Passerina cyanea | (Linnaeus, 1766)
Linnaeus described the species in 1766 as Tanagra cyanea; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Passerina was introduced in 1816 by Vieillot. Passerina comes from the Latin passerinus 'sparrow-like', from passer 'sparrow'. cyanea is Latin for 'blue', for the deep blue breeding plumage of the male. The specimen the first description was based on came from South Carolina.