98 BIRDS 



The Indigo Bunting 



Length — 5.5 to 6 inches. Smaller than the English sparrow. 



Male — Rich blue, with verdigris tints; deepest on head. 

 Wings, tail, and lower back with brownish wash, most 

 prominent in autumn plumage. Quills of wings and 

 tail deep blue, margined with light. 



Female — ^Brown above; yellowish on breast, shading to 

 white underneath, and indistinctly streaked. Wings and 

 tail darkest, sometimes with sUght tinge of blue in outer 

 webs and on shoulders. 



Range — ^North America, from Hudson Bay to Panama. 

 Most common in eastern part of United States. Win- 

 ters in Central America and Mexico. 



Migrations — ^May. September. Summer resident. 



The "glowing indigo" of this tropical-looking visitor 

 that so dehghted Thoreau in the Walden woods, often 

 seems only the more intense by comparison with the blue 

 sky, against which it stands out in rehef as the bird perches, 

 singing, in a low tree-top. What has this gaily dressed, 

 dapper Httle cavalier in common with his dingy sparrow 

 cousins that haimt the ground and delight in dust-bathsj 

 leaving their feathers no whit more dingy than they were 

 before, and in temper, as in plumage, suggesting more of 

 earth than of heaven? Apparently he has nothing, and 

 yet the small brown bird in the roadside thicket, which you 

 have misnamed a sparrow, not noticing the glint of blue in 

 her shoulders and tail, is his mate. Besides the structural 

 resemblances, which are, of course, the only ones consid- 

 ered by ornithologists in classifying birds, the indigo 

 buntings have several sparrow-Uke traits. They feed 



