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One spring morning, scanning the treetops in Central Park, I spotted a smear of ultramarine against the paler blue of the sky. I raised my binoculars, tweaked the focus, and there it was: an Indigo Bunting. I stood transfixed.
While it was a treat to spot this bird in Manhattan, seeing an Indigo Bunting isn鈥檛 exactly difficult; they鈥檙e among the most common songbirds in the East. It wasn鈥檛 a lifer for any of the folks I was birding with. And yet, on a morning when we saw grosbeaks, orioles, and an embarrassment of spellbinding warblers, the consensus held that a highlight of the morning鈥攎aybe the highlight鈥攚as that brilliant bunting.
On the walk home I thought with envy of the Southeastern birders who regularly encounter absurdly beautiful Painted Buntings. Then I envisioned the more subdued but no less lovely palette of the Lazuli Bunting that graces the West. And jeez, could you imagine hiking some desert Southwest canyon and stumbling across a Varied Bunting in its hues of mixed-berry jam?
What, I wondered, is going on with buntings? Why are they all so good?
Like any self-respecting bird journalist, I felt duty-bound to look into it. So I called up Kenn Kaufman, renowned avian expert and 探花精选 field editor. Before we could delve into why these birds are so extraordinary, though, we first had to address another question: What is a bunting, anyway?
As with many questions of taxonomy, the answer is slipperier than you might think. The birds first referred to as buntings, Kaufman explains, were European species from the genus Emberiza. Some of these species, such as Little Bunting and Rustic Bunting, occasionally stray into Alaska, but none are resident to North America. 鈥淎nd they don鈥檛 look nearly as cool as our buntings,鈥 he says. Take that, Emberizidae.
When early naturalists began classifying North American birds, Kaufman tells me, they slapped the sparrow, finch, or bunting label willy-nilly on just about any species with a thickish bill that looked good for cracking seeds, since that鈥檚 what such birds were called back in the Old World. In the early 19th century, ornithologist Alexander Wilson used Cow Bunting for what we call Brown-headed Cowbird, Rice Bunting for Bobolink, and Bay-winged Bunting for Vesper Sparrow. John James 探花精选鈥檚 Ornithological Biography, published in the 1830s, labeled our Henslow鈥檚 Sparrow as Henslow鈥檚 Bunting. Confusingly, 探花精选 also referred to Painted Bunting as Painted Finch. And Smith鈥檚 Longspur? Painted Bunting, of course.
In 1886, when the American Ornithologists鈥 Union published its first North American bird checklist, species names became more standardized and things began to make a bit more sense. By that point, many birds previously called buntings had been renamed as sparrows or finches. And in the checklist, most birds that we call buntings today shed their older labels and took on their familiar names.
Among those birds, the real stars of the bunting bash are the six species in the genus Passerina, part of the cardinal family: Indigo, Lazuli, Painted, and Varied, plus two dazzling species endemic to Mexico: Rose-bellied and Orange-breasted. 鈥淭hey are, all of them, among the most beautiful birds in the world,鈥 Kaufman says.
(Unfortunately, some unsavory characters share Kaufman鈥檚 assessment: In April, state and federal wildlife agents in Florida seized more than 500 birds and with alleged involvement in wildlife trafficking. The birds included Indigo, Lazuli, and Painted Buntings, along with other colorful and desirable species.)
I was glad to have expert confirmation; my buntings-are-good thesis would survive fact-checking. But I still wasn鈥檛 clear on why. For that, I contacted Richard Prum, an evolutionary biologist and ornithologist at Yale University.
His answer: 鈥淏untings are so cool because they鈥檙e cool to themselves.鈥
That鈥檚 classic Prum. He for championing a view of sexual selection rooted in aesthetics: Animals choose mates they find beautiful not because beauty indicates a fitness to pass on good genes or provide some other measurable benefit, but because it is pleasing in itself. Or, as Prum sometimes simplifies it: Beauty happens.
This notion of subjective, arbitrary choices as engines of evolution is not without its detractors. But Prum argues that it is truer to Charles Darwin鈥檚 theory than is the competing view鈥攖hat bold colors, ostentatious tail feathers, and elaborate mating displays are signs of some underlying, objective advantage. 鈥淵ou need to incorporate a concept of beauty as a property of the world in order to scientifically explain it. That鈥檚 a profound way of looking at the world,鈥 he says. 鈥淏untings are an awesome on-ramp for that whole adventure.鈥
It鈥檚 a testament to their extravagant beauty that, for that laid out a new system for measuring bird color, Prum chose buntings as his focus. Most birds鈥 eyes contain four cones, he explains, one more than we humans have. That adds a whole other dimension to their vision and enables them to see colors we cannot detect; a male Painted Bunting appears magnificent enough through human eyes鈥攏ow imagine how good he must look to the potential mate who can appreciate the ultraviolet green on his back. 鈥淭o understand how cool buntings are to themselves, we had to invent a whole new science of avian color,鈥 Prum says.
My reporting was turning up evidence that buntings are even better than I鈥檇 realized. Maybe I would need a few more college degrees to truly understand why, but I could see the big picture. Beauty happens鈥攇ood enough for me.
I just had one last question for Prum: If generation after generation of female buntings keeps choosing decadently colored males, will there eventually emerge some uber-bunting whose vibrant beauty we can鈥檛 even imagine?
He responded with a question of his own, one that put me right back in the funky haze of the freshman dorms: 鈥淒on鈥檛 we already have buntings that we couldn鈥檛 imagine?鈥
Whoa.
To illustrate his point, Prum shares a brief story. On a recent visit to Arizona, he and another birder came across a male Varied Bunting. Its deep colors were beautifully bathed in morning sunlight. 鈥淎nd this guy is just, like, beyond our imagining,鈥 he says. 鈥淩eally beyond our imagining. When you look at the richness that we鈥檙e all engaged in because we love birds鈥擨 mean, that鈥檚 the world we鈥檙e already living in.鈥