Birder Alert! Beautiful Painted Buntings on Amelia Island

What’s North America’s most colorful song bird? The male Painted Bunting. Lucky Amelia islanders might get a glimpse of these beautiful wild birds.

What is North America’s most colorful song bird?

The handsome fellow is the male Painted Bunting. Lucky Amelia islanders and visiting birders have the opportunity to get a glimpse of this wild beauty right here in Fernandina Beach. They can occasionally be spotted in public parks and are regular visitors to some bird feeders around the island (they love white millet seed.)

Painted Buntings like barrier islands and the best time to potentially see them occurs from around mid-August through mid-October on Amelia Island. However, a small number stay on this barrier island year round (and some pass through in April).

With bright blue head, red breast, and green plumage on its back and wings, this wild bird looks more like one you’d see in a pet shop. In fact, due to their beautiful colors, they are reportedly targeted by those in the caged bird trade (catching wild birds is still legal in Mexico and some other countries, but illegal in the USA.) The Eastern population of Painted Buntings are said to be in decline because of both caged bird trade and loss of habitat.

Where Birders May Potentially Spot Buntings

Bring binoculars and some patience! The best public parks to look for Painted Buntings are:

1. Fort Clinch State Park (the official “gateway” to the Great Florida Birding Trail), with over 1,400 acres. Enter the state park’s main entrance from Atlantic Avenue, not far from Main Beach Park in Fernandina. There’s a special bird kiosk with lots of birding information.

2. Egans Greenway lists the Painted Bunting as summer resident with frequency of sightings “common” (i.e. several sightings a week). The main Egans Greenway access with restrooms is behind the Fernandina Beach Rec Center on Atlantic Avenue in Fernandina Beach.

Amelia Island Painted Buntings (the greens could be young males or females)
Amelia Island Painted Buntings (greens can be young males or females)

Amelia Island is unique in that it is “one of the few places in Florida that can host Painted Buntings in the winter and during spring/summer breeding season,” according to Leah Fuller, Program Coordinator of the Painted Bunting Observer Team (PBOT) at the University of North Carolina. “Most Painted Buntings head north to the Carolinas and Georgia to breed, but Amelia Island has been known to have full-time resident populations,” said Ms. Fuller.

Tips to Attract Painted Buntings

The species likes “shrub-scrub vegetation,” such as hedges, bushes, small trees, undergrowth, and placing a birdfeeder in close proximity to some cover vegetation may help to attract these birds. Their favorite bird seed is white proso millet. The seed is often one of the main ingredients in many wild bird seed mixes, but you may have to special order bags of pure white millet online as most big box retailers don’t sell it. Or purchase a seed mix from Walmart, Lowe’s, or Home Depot in your area and use a strainer to separate the white millet. The buntings seem to especially like a shallow plate of water to take a dip and are frequent visitors to this type of bird bath.

Breeding Patterns of Eastern Population of Painted Buntings

Eastern Painted Buntings are said to summer in northeast Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. The Eastern population reportedly “migrate south between mid-October and mid-November.” Eastern Painted Buntings fly to central and southern Florida, Cuba or the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico to breed/nest,” according to researchers of the species at the University of North Carolina. When spring arrives, they head back north around mid-April.

Florida is the only state that consistently has a breeding population in the spring and summer (in northeast Florida) and a wintering population (mostly in central and south Florida),” according to PBOT website. Note that there is another separate breeding population of Painted Buntings in the midwest USA (Kansas and Missouri south to Texas and Louisiana).

Read more about birding on Amelia Island, see related article.