Lazuli Bunting, Carpinteria State Beach, 2021-08-24

Reposted from https://lies.tumblr.com/post/660509419179835392.

jhfrench:

Lazuli buntings are striking birds found in western North America. I love that even the females—which, like with most birds, are drabber than the male—have a tinge of blue!
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This piece is a companion to my indigo bunting painting, and will appear in the next issue of Living Bird in a profile featuring related eastern and western species. Having recently moved from coast to coast, it was a nice project to tie together my past year of birding!
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Lazuli buntings for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

LAZBs are known as “fire followers”. They like the flowered hillsides that grow up in the early years after a chaparral wildfire.

If you’ve followed me long enough you know that many of my favorite local birding sites burned in the massive Thomas Fire in December of 2017. We’re now T-plus-18-months, and the flowering hillsides are full of these beautiful birds. I saw a female this morning; here’s a photo of a male that I took a few weeks ago.

Reposted from https://lies.tumblr.com/post/185551239041.

steepravine:

Perched Lazuli Bunting. One species down for “larks birds” project!
#idahome #thisisboise #perched (at Boise, Idaho)

I’ve seen more of these so far this spring than in the rest of my life put together. Partly it’s doing more birdwatching, but I think partly, too, it’s that they’re “fire followers”, and most of the places I birdwatch are in or near the Thomas Fire burn area.

They’re surprisingly hard to spot for birds that sing at the top of their lungs and look like, well, this.

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/174638424270.

crazycritterlife:

Lazuli Bunting – San Luis Obispo, CA

#237

One of the coolest things about birdwatching is the surprise factor. I experience surprises every single time I go out. A male Lazuli Bunting singing on the dog path by Santa Monica Creek was today’s big surprise, at the end of my morning walk with Rory when I assumed I’d already found everything I was going to find and was just putting my bins on a bird that had flown into the top of a little scrub oak; just me acting out of habit more than anything else; “bird every bird” and all that; probably another White-crowned or a House Sparrow, and those birds are legit, and cool, and deserve to be looked at too, of course; I have a whole list of reasons why it makes sense to check out all the birds, even the common ones, even the ones I’ve already ID’d by ear, but there’s a level on which I was just kind of going through the motions, at the end of my walk, ready to get home and get to work, so I dutifully raised the binoculars and… wow. Lazuli Bunting.

Cool.

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/172832371651.