The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher

This week’s surprise—a rare (for the Big Yard) female Varied Bunting.

June 25, 2025

The sky groans in the east. The wind shoulders in as clouds like black irises glom onto the Mule Mountains. Thunder cracks like a sudden rockfall. The rain comes as I revel in wet summer skin like a red-spotted toad.

A chubasco at the edge of the planet.

But not today. Such is the whimsical (and often disappointing) nature of the monsoon season.

Instead, I revel in buntings. This week, for the first time in two years (and only the fourth time in recorded yard history!), a varied bunting visits the yard. A female, which is a challenging ID. When the small, seed-eating relative of cardinals, tanagers, and grosbeaks, appeared at the fountain, I guessed “bunting,” but needed the photos I snapped to parse out which one of the possible four female buntings the yard has hosted over the years. Her cinnamon-brown breast showed no streaks (indigo bunting). No warm, buffy breastband (lazuli bunting). No vibrant green on her back and head (painted bunting). Which meant she was a denizen of mesquite washes and scrubby canyons whose northernmost range just sneaks out of Mexico and into southeast Arizona this time of year.

Varied Buntings (this is the male) are mostly a Mexican species, spending the winter in southern Mexico and summer in northern Mexico.

During migration, lazuli buntings regularly visit the yard on their way to breeding grounds north of us in the western half of the country. Indigo buntings, although common in the eastern US, are fairly rare here, but they do occasionally put on a stunning show in summer.

I’ve seen only two painted buntings in my life, both times in my yard. In my PJs. Both were females, so gray at the fountain they could have been dark-eyed juncos in the rising sun. But my camera revealed not a “plain green” as the guidebooks describe it, but an astounding green, a pastel somewhere between seafoam and fern—a color unlike any other bird that has visited my yard.

In my mind, the female is a clear rival of the oft-touted male painted bunting that looks like it bathed in a child’s Crayola watercolors puddling in the rain.

If there were any rain.

A female Painted Bunting from Central America at the fountain in October 2021.

Long distance migrants, Indigo Buntings (male above, female below) spend the winter in South America.

The always stunning, male Lazuli Bunting, a winter resident of Mexico.

Thanks for supporting the Big Yard! I’ll report when we get the first chubasco! Fingers crossed!