Would You Believe Ten Territorial Turquoise Buntings Per Mile?

It’s been a bit more than a month now since I promised:

And though I have thus far made good on the latter two of my three promises, with one oriole oration and a pair of pregnant dragonfly nursery rhymes, uhh, tales, I must admit, I have struggled to sort out just how to make good on that third feathery assurance.

As the ancestral saying goes: “No bunting; no bueno.” (Feel free to quote me.)

Time to pony up, Dave-o.

My attentions have been mostly overtaken during these past three weeks with all the trimmings before and following a wedding that bound two lovely people whom I completely adore, a daughter (mine not by birth, but by choosing and commitment), and the boy she befriended during first grade, who grew up to become the young man and now, beloved, thirty-something husband he is today. These two make my eyes go watery and my heart swell.

It’s good to surrender sometimes. Family and celebrations. Evenings and mornings of heartfelt conversations. Suppers in the garden. Ceremonies and receptions, and promises before witnesses. Chaotic whimsy and the gentle bending of those more precise definitions of words like ‘soon’ toward what is actually possible instead; ‘soon enough.’

Finally, the house is quiet again and the garden that really just wants to fall apart and nap for a while by early August can be allowed to do just that. Which means my mind, too can quiet, hopefully to the point I’ll be able to hear the story voices of little songbirds whispering in my ear once again. It’s been a while, though I’m most definitely not complaining.

I know better than to underestimate a turquoise troubadour or rush into the weaving of any tale involving such lazuli-poets at the expense of proper awe and honesty. Carelessness simply will not do when it comes to describing creatures so finely attuned and feather-adorned. Turquoise with punctuation marks of black, and iron stains atop light clay. Bright, warbled phrases, repeated from high, lonely branches. Excited descents and ascents in deep river canyons; recitations beginning before sunrise and continuing past sundown.

Lazulis are all these things …and more.

I have never seen so many Lazuli Buntings as I have this year and I’m not talking some meh, 15 or 20 percent increase. Instead, there were probably two and a half to three times as many Lazuli Buntings in some of my favorite unpeopled places this early summer as I can ever recall seeing, hearing, or trying to get close enough to photograph.

Of course, there may not have been this same swelling of bunting populations in other Lazuli breeding areas. Populations vary from place to place, and certainly do ebb and flow, year to year. But based on decades of devoted observation in a pair of different places I camped for more than a week each, earlier this summer, that is my ‘back of the envelope’ guess.

There have been years when you or I, or any reasonably attentive, sighted and hearing capable person might only have encountered a handful of Lazuli Buntings in an entire day, but during the last handful years, a two or three hour, early morning bird ramble would have often yielded as many as ten of these stunning, turquoise, bunting sightings; a very hopeful development in a world full of precipitous bird declines. Then this year came along and, kaboom! I swear, most mornings I’d already seen a dozen Lazuli males within the first mile and a half of walking near camp, and if I drove slowly, just five or six miles, either upriver or down, I’d probably have been able to count as many as thirty different azul, clay and rust colored singers before lunch in addition to all the other birds. Ninety percent of those seen or heard were males, of course. The females, far more elusive, have much less to say and come wisely adorned with ‘blend in’ colored feathers. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Each singing male implies a hidden, mated female, somewhere.

It is those males who need to be seen, who call attention to themselves, stating their case to eligible females, encouraging their partners sitting on eggs in hidden nests and proclaiming the boundaries of their fiefdoms to other competing males, sometimes quite aggressively, attacking and chasing intruders with fast, erratic flights through the understory, and often even singing while flying.

By now (mid August), I’m guessing that most of their annual mating rituals and the hard work that follows will be mostly complete and that some of the earliest and more efficient breeders will already have fledged their second nestfuls, begun their post-breeding molts and started working their way southward.

What I wouldn’t give to witness and greet their unhurried arrivals at one of the temporary, ‘molting hotspots’ they frequent in southern Arizona, New Mexico, and/or northern Sonora, Mexico where they typically pause for a month or more, recharging and completing their molts before continuing even farther south into Mexico, for the months of winter.

Hey, a fella can always dream…

Curious Eyes & Lazulis; When Baby Buntings Learned To Fly

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August 30, 2023

A gift is something you haven’t earned, so really, questions of one’s worthiness are quite irrelevant to any discussion of it, but that doesn’t stop someone like me from wondering what possibly I could have done to deserve such an unexpected boon. Stated in simp…

The Cautious Eyes Of A Lazuli

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June 17, 2025

I’ve spent dozens of hours over the past few decades trying to get close to Lazuli Buntings and have gotten marginally better at it, but unlike, say, even bread dough which somehow knows when you have failed miserably enough times to finally let you succeed, rising properly to bake into a perfect loaf, Lazuli Buntings do not care a whit about your feeli…