The Indigo Bunting, with a cerulean body and a brilliant indigo head, is one of my favorite birds to introduce to beginning birders. They’re loud, colorful, and put on a show during the spring and summer months when they calls Wisconsin home. These birds settle into the summer breeding season with the blooming Blephilia, exploding onto the scene with the blue spiderwort. Blue is a rare color in the matrix of communities and animals calling southern Wisconsin home. Bellflower, spiderwort, bottle gentian, and roadside chicory are some of the few plants with blue blooms.
But the indigo is not truly blue. The bird does not have blue pigment, but rather refracts blue light. If you hold a bunting feather facing the sun, you will see the dull brown color of melanin. If instead the sun comes from behind the feather, microscopic structures will refract that unmistakable cerulean back toward you.
Indigo Bunting eating seeds from a bird feeder (photo via Pixabay).
Indigo Buntings use stars as more than just plumage enhancement. Besides refracting the sun’s rays, the birds also use the stars to orient themselves during migration. The behavior is learned, as a sort of map from other buntings. Researchers discovered this by studying Indigo Buntings in a planetarium versus a natural setting under the night sky.
Another extraordinary feature of the bird is that they have worked around Brown-headed Cowbird nest parasitism. Indigo Buntings will abandon their nest if cowbirds parasitize it, or they will build over the cowbird egg. They readily re-nest and sometimes nest late enough to avoid the cowbird breeding season, thus avoiding parasitism.
You can find plentiful Indigo Buntings throughout Faville Grove this summer, nearly anywhere with some trees.
Written by Drew Harry, Faville Grove Sanctuary land steward
Cover photo: Brightly-colored male Indigo Bunting perched on a stem in a prairie full of greens and yellow blooms (photo by Jim Hudgins/USFWS Midwest).
