BLUE BUNTINGS

At the right you can see a common little bird around here showing up in weedy areas. It's the Blue Bunting, CYANOCOMPSA PARELLINA, a species endemic to lowland Mexico and northern Central America. It's different from the common buntings of North America -- the Indigo in the East and the Lazuli in the West -- in that it's much darker and has a more massive beak.

Among all the small, dark birds found here, the male Blue Bunting is distinctive with the "powder blue" or light blue areas on his face, shoulder and rump. Females are brown little birds extremely hard or impossible to separate from other small seed-eaters in the field. At least at this time of year the species is quiet and retiring, just here and there popping up into the weeds, especially next to woods, as I walk by.

In North America about seven species names include the word "bunting," while in Mexico we have about nine. So, what really is a "bunting?"

Most but not all members of the genus Passerina are regarded as buntings. However, you can see that our Blue Bunting is in the genus Cyanocompsa, plus other species in entirely different subfamilies also are called buntings -- the Lark Bunting, for instance.

Maybe the Lark Bunting suggests the key to what a bunting is. Though Lark Buntings are most closely related to sparrows, which are mostly small, thick- beaked, brown-striped birds, Lark Buntings themselves are almost entirely black except for their wing patches.

Therefore it seems that any small, thick-billed, sparrow-shaped bird that is predominantly black or very dark, no matter what his taxonomic relationships with other birds are, is likely to be called a bunting.

But then there's the gaily colored Painted Bunting and Orange-breasted Bunting, who seem to be called buntings just because they're in the genus Passerina...

In the end, it's the same old story: These common names make little sense. If you want to be precise, use Latin, and even that system is full of weird exceptions and anomalies.