Gorgeous and Elusive, Painted Buntings Are Flitting Across Texas

It’s pitch black when I arrive at 5:30 a.m. at the Lewisville Lake Environmental Learning Area, a sprawling, 2,600-acre nature preserve about twenty miles north of Dallas. After I make contact with my party, the seven of us caravan in our vehicles, bumping a mile or so down a gated gravel road that twists deep into the woods, where we park by a meadow. Doused head to toe with bug spray, I put on a borrowed headlamp and fall in line behind my companions, stalking silently through fields of waist-high grass and wildflowers and trying to avoid low-hanging branches, fallen logs, and armadillo holes in the predawn darkness.

The secret mission I’ve joined on this May morning has one goal: to capture and study painted buntings—the brilliantly colored songbirds that migrate to Texas in April and stay until at least August, mating, nesting, and raising their young. One of the most beloved birds in North America, its numbers are dropping, and the painted bunting is now listed by the American Bird Conservancy as a species of concern. Its decline is linked to a bevy of factors, including habitat loss, window strikes, and the illegal songbird trade. Another threat is nest parasitism by the brown cowbird, an “evil genius” species that lays its eggs in bunting nests to trick the bunting mom into raising the chicks as a foster parent, often at the expense of her own young. All in all, painted buntings, while still relatively abundant across  the southeastern U.S., may soon need our help.

“This is a species that’s still very common in Texas, but it’s declining,” says Jim Bednarz, a professor of biology and an avian ecologist at University of North Texas. He has run a research program on the petite passerines since 2017. “Now is the time to understand the factors that might be causing population decline, so we can conserve them in Texas for all time.”

Bednarz and his graduate assistant, Alejandra Gage, along with a group of undergrads, comb through this densely wooded section of the Lewisville park five days a week from early May to August—netting birds, and later in the season, searching for bunting nests and counting nestlings, in hopes of learning more about the species’ mysterious breeding ecology. The team has captured and released nearly six hundred painted buntings (or PABUs, as they call them). Bednarz, who is 71 and has no current plans to retire, oversees the team’s work as they measure, weigh, and band each bird. All painted buntings are fitted with a tiny metal U.S. Geological Survey band. Adults are also given a unique color combination with three additional plastic bands, to help the team ID the birds.

After setting up base camp—a few chairs and a plastic crate as a table, along with a digital scale, rulers for measuring tail feathers, and a stack of bird books—the group heads out in twos and threes to the study grids located a short walk from camp, where they’ll prepare ten mist nets that are hidden in the dense brush. The nets are strung with a fine mesh that is nearly invisible, especially in the low light of early morning, when the males come out to perch and sing. A decoy bunting named Oscar—a realistic-looking foam and feather “bird” that was painted by a student—is placed near one of the nets in hopes that a territorial male or interested female might take the bait. When one does, it’s harmlessly entangled for a few moments before being placed in a cotton bag and taken back to camp to be processed. Setup complete, we troop back to base, and as dawn breaks, the researchers talk about their work. 

Painted buntings (Passerina ciris) are at the top of many birdwatchers’ life lists, and for good reason. With their cobalt-blue heads, scarlet breasts, and vivid green backs, adult males are often mistaken for escaped tropical birds. “They are a spark bird for so many people,” says Travis Audubon’s Jessica Womack. In birder parlance, a spark bird is the species that gets you hooked on the hobby. Womack leads frequent bird walks around Austin and showed me my first painted bunting—a gorgeous male singing loudly from his perch in Commons Ford Metro Park. 

Buntings are an amateur bird photographer’s dream—Facebook pages devoted to Texas birds are full of colorful shots showing them eating at feeders or splashing in birdbaths. Females and immature males are a more muted (or “cryptic”) green, but still striking, and spotting females is a rare treat, since they blend into the brush and don’t sing like the showy males. When Jessica tried to point out a female to me in early May, I followed along clumsily with my binoculars, but she quickly realized, with some disappointment, that it was most likely a juvenile male. The two are incredibly hard to tell apart, even for experts—a rarity in the bird world.

That biological oddity is at the crux of Bednarz’s research: he’s trying to prove that the juvenile males are delaying maturation to compete with adult males, who are fiercely territorial and will fight off usurpers, often leaving both birds injured. But if a young male appears to be a female, he might be able to move in (and nab a mate) undetected. “We believe that the males are mimicking females to gain access to adult ‘rainbow’ male territories and sneak copulations with the resident female,” Bednarz explained as we swatted mosquitoes. It’s not exactly a new theory—scientists have been discussing it for decades—but it’s never been fully researched. That’s where Alejandra Gage comes in. She uses a tiny needle to take a blood sample of each bird the group captures, whether in the nets or in their nests. In the fall, she’ll extract DNA samples in the lab to determine if the juvenile males are indeed producing offspring. She and Bednarz hope to have results by next spring. 

As the morning goes on, the team fans out to check the nets every half hour or so. In total, five male painted buntings (adult and juvenile) are caught, along with two warblers and a female cardinal. The birds are placed in the bird bags and hung from a tree branch until they can be processed. Since the students are in training, they practice the steps on all the birds, even the warblers and the cardinals. I love watching the team work and listening to their banter as they weigh and measure the birds. Bednarz generously invites me to handle and release some of the captives, which was a treat, even when a six-year-old male bunting bit my finger while I attempted the bander’s grip—holding the bird’s head between my index and middle fingers. He was feisty, and the team was thrilled that he was still alive and coming back to the preserve year after year. 

As it turns out, this environmental learning area, which is comanaged by the city of Lewisville, the University of North Texas, and the Lewisville school district (along with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers), is a kind of ground zero for painted buntings—something that Bednarz wasn’t aware of when he began his research seven years ago. “When I started the project, I would have never dreamed there were so many painted buntings out there,” he told me, estimating that two hundred or so individuals live just in the UNT research area within the preserve, and possibly as many as a thousand flit about the park at large.  “This is the core of their Texas habitat . . . they’re packed in there,” Bednarz added. “LLELA is excellent habitat for them, with its mix of blackland prairie and woodlands.” 

Indeed, more painted buntings migrate to Texas from Mexico and Central America than to any other state (Oklahoma comes in second), and birdwatchers travel here from all over the country to see them. Whenever anyone suggests naming a new state bird of Texas, the painted bunting is a top candidate. Bednarz is all for it. “They are an amazing representation of the fauna and biodiversity of our state. I would call them the quintessential bird of Texas,” he says, adding that he has nothing against the current state bird, the northern mockingbird. “But how many states have the mockingbird as the state bird?” he says. Five do: Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, and Tennessee, along with Texas. “It’s not unique to Texas. Painted buntings are in every part of the state where there’s suitable habitat. They’re a much better representative for the whole state,” he adds, trailing off with a chuckle: “If I had any influence . . .” 

Painted buntings may need all the good PR they can get, especially as climate change poses a growing threat. In late May, tornadoes and accompanying storms in North Texas wreaked havoc at the Lewisville research site. The severe weather destroyed dozens of nests and felled many trees, Gage and Bednarz tell me a few weeks after my visit. “I’ve worked here for ten summers, and it’s the worst I’ve ever seen—lots of trees down,” says Bednarz. But there are bright spots. Gage says that the birds who lost nests have already most likely started new ones, and Bednarz points out that the extra rain means that there will be a bigger insect population this summer, which translates to more food for the birds, stronger embryos, and more bugs to feed their nestlings. “It’ll all come back,” he says. “Sometimes disruption can be good.” 

Every bit of advantage helps these birds. At this stage of the season’s research, the netting is mostly done, and the team is investigating nests, a process that involves bushwhacking into dense forest that’s often dotted with poison ivy. Painted buntings prefer to build their grassy cup nests in hackberry and cedar elms, and finding them is not easy. Normally they build them at eye level, but Alejandra told me about a nest the team was scoping out that is nine feet high, meaning the scientists had to figure out how to quietly drag a ladder into the brush. “We try to be as unobserved by the birds as possible . . . we treat the nest very delicately,” Bednarz said. “Once we get what we’re looking for, we like to get out of there as soon as possible. We use a different route when we’re departing compared to when we’re arriving, so, a predator won’t follow our scent.” 

Even with these precautions, painted bunting nests are extremely vulnerable. Predation by snakes is the most common cause of egg loss, and the fact that the female brown cowbird must lay her egg in another bird’s nest means that many bunting moms end up caring for the much larger cowbird nestling, which outcompetes the bunting babies for resources. In the 2023 UNT research season, 13.3 percent of nests in the study area were parasitized by cowbirds, and about half of those nests were abandoned by the painted bunting mothers. Even if the bunting nestlings survive alongside the cowbird baby (and they often do, due to the mother’s constant work and feeding), the adult female is likely to begin her fall migration already exhausted. But the fact that the painted buntings are coming back to nest in this spot year after year is hopeful.

The team is optimistic, even when tragedy strikes. Gage told me they’d recently lost an adult male—he was likely hit by a car while performing a mating dance (they often preen in the middle of the road). But she also shared an exciting discovery: a nesting female that had been processed in 2020, as a two-year-old, was now six, with her own clutch of eggs. “We caught her on camera, and that was really neat.” Gage’s enthusiasm was infectious, as was her affection for these beautiful and fragile birds. “So, yeah, I’m planning on getting a painted bunting tattoo after I finish,” she told me.