Figure 311. Adult male Painted Buntings were a thorn in the side of Committee members for decades because of persistent questions about the origin of these birds. In 2005 the number of accepted Painted Bunting records finally exceeded 100 and the frequency of occurrence surpassed four per year, leading the CBRC to vote this troublemaker off the review list. Part of the problem is that, in contrast to those of green birds, records of colorful males are not particularly concentrated during spring and fall migration periods. One record not endorsed by the CBRC refers to this immaculate male, photographed at Corn Spring in Riverside County on the somewhat early spring date of 19 April 1997 (1997-090; Joe Fuhrman).

 

Figure 312. This Painted Bunting, photographed on 1 October 2000 at Galileo Hill in Kern County (2001-043; Larry Sansone), was initially published as a first-fall bird (McKee and Erickson 2002). In response, C. W. Thompson (in litt.) suggested that it “almost certainly” was an adult female in definitive alternate plumage, citing uniformly worn plumage and lack of contrast between outer primary coverts and outer primary edgings. The bird does not appear to be particularly worn, however, and it would be odd for the onset of prebasic molt to be delayed into October (see Thompson 1991a, Fig. 7). The bird’s yellow gape and its replaced tertial, inner greater covert, and outer median coverts may indicate a first-fall bird starting preformative molt. It is perhaps best left unaged.

 

 

Figure 439. Distribution of 102 Painted Buntings accepted through 2003. Four out of every five occurrences (83 of 102) come from the southeastern deserts and the coast from Monterey County southward. Ten of the other 19 records come from Southeast Farallon Island.

 

Figure 440. Seasonal occurrence of the Painted Bunting, comparing accepted records with those for which natural occurrence was deemed questionable. The two classes of record are superimposed upon each other (e.g., the first half of November shows five accepted and four not-accepted records, values that are reversed in the second half of that month). Records questioned by the Committee are scattered through the year and most involve adult males on the coastal slope, some of which showed signs of possible or probable captivity (e.g., abnormally faded plumage, broken feathers, scars on the head, ill-fitting bands). But the data might also be seen as mirroring this species’ apparently “natural” utilization of feeders during winter in the Midwest and the East. The appearance of a weakly bimodal pattern of fall occurrence may reflect birds migrating before and after completion of the prebasic/preformative molt.

 

Figure 441. Annual occurrence of the Painted Bunting in California. After a trickle of records through the 1960s and 1970s, the rate of occurrence increased from 1980 through 2003. The 18 individuals accepted in 2000 exceeded the combined total for the 1960s and 1970s by four, and fell just two short of the total for the 1980s.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PAINTED BUNTING Passerina ciris (Linnaeus, 1758)

Accepted: 102 (68%)	Treated in Appendix H: yes
Not accepted: 47	CBRC review: records through 2004
Not submitted/reviewed: 27	Large color images:see Figures

As reviewed by Mlodinow and Hamilton (2005), this bunting breeds in two populations in the southern United States and northern Mexico. The larger, western population includes all of P. c. pallidior plus the western component of P. c. ciris, a taxonomic division discredited by Thompson (1991b) because the subspecies limits do not conform to these allopatric populations. The western population breeds from eastern New Mexico and southern Kansas to the Gulf coast of Mississippi, locally east along the coast through the Florida panhandle, and south to Chihuahua and northern Tamaulipas. Birds of this population winter from southern Texas (very rare) and Sinaloa south along the Pacific and Atlantic slopes of Middle America to Panama. The eastern population breeds from southeastern North Carolina south to central Florida and winters from southern Florida south through the northern West Indies. The species has strayed as far north as Saskatchewan and northern Ontario, but less ambitious individuals—often adult males at feeders—are encountered with some regularity across much of central and eastern North America. Spring vagrancy is the rule in the continental interior and along the Atlantic slope north of New York into the Maritime Provinces, whereas late fall/winter vagrancy is more typical in parts of the East that lie closer to the normal range. The species is a regular late-summer and early-fall visitor to southeastern Arizona and occurs casually farther west, mainly in fall, from southwestern British Columbia (adult male photographed at Richmond 1–4 August 1995 fide R. Toochin) south to Baja California Sur. In the Pacific Northwest, a green bird was present 21 March–4 April 2006 in southwestern British Columbia (NAB 60:424, 425), an adult male was present 10 February–3 March 2002 in northwestern Washington, and an adult male was present during “late December” 1999 in southwestern Oregon.

California’s first five Painted Buntings were found in the Tijuana River valley, San Diego County, during the autumns of 1962 and 1963 (McCaskie et al. 1967b). Through 2003, the state claimed 102 CBRC-endorsed records, all but a handful from the southern two-thirds of the state (Figure 439); see also Appendix H. Nearly nine out of every ten accepted fall records (86 of 97) involve birds first detected between 17 August and 16 October, with a peak in early September (see Figure 440, which charts all dates of occurrence). The remaining fall records extend to 3 December, with a minor peak in mid November. This temporal pattern may partially reflect the western population’s molt-migration strategy, in which most birds undergo prebasic/preformative molt during migratory stopovers in southwestern deserts before continuing on to the wintering grounds (Thompson 1991a). Plumages of birds studied in California suggest that the bimodal pattern results from birds migrating before and after these molts. Birds of the eastern population do not employ this strategy, molting instead on the breeding grounds (Thompson 1991a).

The CBRC has endorsed five spring/summer records, three involving adult males in late May at desert oases, one of a green bird present on 16 May 2001 on Pt. Loma in San Diego County, and one of a year-old male collected on 24 June 1966 about eight miles west of Santa Rosa in Sonoma County.

Records of this species were frustratingly difficult for the Committee to evaluate. This hardy bird is, by far, the most common wild bird for sale in pet shops in northwestern Baja California (Hamilton 2001), and records of Painted Buntings found in California during summer and winter periods—those of adult males especially—are believed to involve escapees in many cases (see Figure 440). The species’ occurrence during periods of migration may also be suspect. For example, the first record of a Painted Bunting that the CBRC deemed to be of questionable natural occurrence is of an adult male with yellowish underparts and a scar between the orbits that turned up on 17 April 1972 at the remote Sagehen Creek Field Station, Nevada County, and was collected the following day (Hawthorne 1972). The record of an adult male present 1–2 August 2002 in Arcadia, Los Angeles County, was not accepted because the ill-fitting band on its leg appeared to be other than a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service band. A detailed review and analysis of all Painted Bunting records in California through the fall of 1998 (see Erickson and Hamilton 2001:42-44) revealed that first-year birds—along with green birds that were not reliably aged or sexed—strongly predominated among fall records, whereas adult males accounted for nearly all of the spring, summer, and winter reports (green birds have since started to appear in winter, three times alongside adult males). As noted by Johnson (1994), “increasing evidence on the nature of spring and summer vagrants, as documented by accumulated records in American Birds and other sources, points to males as the predominant sex of individuals leading the vanguard of spring-summer range expansion” (emphasis in the original). This general tendency may offer the best explanation for why green birds predominate so clearly during fall but not in spring/summer. Winter records, particularly those involving adult males and multiple birds, remain more suspect.

The above-mentioned status review recommended that the CBRC reconsider the state’s three accepted spring records, plus a not-accepted early fall record of an adult male in faded plumage. Through this process, the Committee reaffirmed the three spring records and endorsed the fall record. It bears noting that two records of adult males from Inyo and Kern Counties in June and July 1996 were not accepted by the Committee at around the time the earlier spring records were being reaffirmed. This reflected a situation in which enough members voted to prevent overturning the previously accepted spring records, but the new records—although seemingly comparable—lacked the supermajority needed for acceptance. Records can, of course, undergo further review if the CBRC identifies apparent inconsistencies that warrant reconsideration.

Records from outside of the fall migration period and those of high-plumaged males continue to raise doubts. The issue is particularly pressing in San Diego County, where Unitt (2004) concluded that “the Painted Bunting occurs . . . mainly as an escapee from captivity” and that “identifying any particular individual as a vagrant rather than escapee is now impossible.” Unitt acknowledged that the first wave of records from the Tijuana River valley “almost certainly” involved legitimate vagrants, and the CBRC has, over the course of many years, endorsed the legitimacy of numerous San Diego County records (see Figure 439). Each of the accepted records involves an apparent fall or spring migrant, and none refers to a bird showing irregularities that suggested prior captivity. Out of the ten records from this county most recently reviewed by the CBRC (dating back to 20 March 1997), six are from winter, two are from fall, and one each is from spring and late summer. Eight of the ten were not accepted on the basis of questionable natural occurrence. Another five winter, three spring, and two late fall reports from San Diego County since 1998 were never submitted for CBRC review (fide P. Unitt, San Diego Bird Atlas data). The considerable incongruity between this recent pattern of occurrence and California’s overall pattern, shown in Figure 440, supports the notion that escaped and released birds now make up a considerable fraction of the Painted Buntings found in San Diego County.

Nevertheless, Figure 441 shows that the frequency of CBRC-accepted records statewide increased more rapidly than is likely to be explained by changes in observer practices, and there is little reason to believe that releases of Painted Buntings increased by such a margin. As hypothesized by Mlodinow and Hamilton (2005), comparable increases in this species’ rate of extralimital occurrence across much of North America since 1970, particularly in winter and spring, may reflect “a shift in distribution whose causes include both climate change and the relatively constant availability of food” at backyard feeding stations. On the other hand, Sykes et al. (2006) found illegal trapping of Painted Buntings to be “widespread in southeastern Florida.” The recent cessation of CBRC review (immediately after acceptance of the 100th individual) will hamper future efforts to evaluate the Painted Bunting’s patterns of occurrence in California. Of course, the most recent decade had seen a steady decline in observer willingness to submit records of this species, and this was undermining the integrity and usefulness of the CBRC’s Painted Bunting database before review stopped. Thus, in a sense, the escapees won out, having taxed the forbearance of the birding community and the Committee to the point where retreat came to be viewed as the most attractive option.