A male indigo is smaller than a bluebird and has darker blue coloration. It is common in many parts of Arkansas, usually along edges of fields and woods and many times close to water. (Joe Mosby Photo)

I made a new friend in the garden the other morning. Maybe the friendship is one-sided, but that male indigo bunting got a spoken welcome from me.

It wasn’t the bird’s first visit to the garden – if it was the same bunting. A few days ago it flew in, sat on a tomato cage for a while then flew off. This time, the visit was longer.

The bunting sat on one tomato cage and looked down. Then it moved to the next cage and again looked down. At the third of four cages, the bunting hopped down briefly to a
branch of a tomato plant then hopped back to the top of the cage.

The conclusion from this observer was the indigo bunting was looking for tomato horn worms. I haven’t seen any on the plants yet this season, but they have a way of showing up and stripping a bunch of leaves off the tomato plants before you realize what’s happening.

Mr. Indigo Bunting, if you truly are looking for tomato horn worms, welcome. Please come back soon.

The indigo bunting is common in many parts of Arkansas, yet it isn’t widely known outside of birding cycles, and it is often misidentified.

Bright blue in color? Must be a bluebird.

Nope, the indigo bunting male is a darker blue, and it is slightly smaller than a bluebird. The male indigo is blue all over, while the bluebird has a rusty-red chest and white on other underparts. Another blue bird in Arkansas is the blue grosbeak, not as common as either the indigo bunting or the bluebird. The blue grosbeak is larger than the indigo bunting.

Scientists tell us that the indigo bunting’s feathers aren’t really blue, that they are iridescent, black but appearing blue when the light shines on them in a certain way. When the light isn’t right, the birds appear to be black.

Indigo buntings live over most of the eastern and Midwestern United States. They are found in Arkansas all through the year, although ornithologists say the birds are migratory.

They are members of the finch family, which also includes cardinals.

The indigo bunting tends to be an edge dweller – edge of woods, edges of farm fields close to woods, abandoned farm fields. A personal observation, not necessarily a scientific point, is that I’ve often seen indigo buntings near water but not on the water.

When the search for the ivory-bill woodpecker burst forth about three years ago, a slow drive along a back road close to Bayou DeView, near Brinkley, brought dozens of indigo buntings into view. Some were on the ground, some were on branches of low bushes. The garden mentioned is a few yards from a small pond.

Indigo buntings have a varied diet, feeding mostly on insects during the warmer periods of the year and on seeds in colder weather. They go for bugs of all sorts, including grasshoppers, beetles and caterpillars. The seeds eaten are mostly weed and grass seeds.

The female indigo bunting has none of the blue of the male. Instead, she is mostly brown with streaked wings. Indigos build woven cup-shaped nests in the fork of branches in bushes. Some have even been known to put nests near the top of cotton plants. Usually, three or four eggs that are very pale blue or blue-white in color are laid.

The song of the male indigo bunting is described as “sweet-sweet, chew-chew, sweet-sweet.” On the Birds of Arkansas Web site, the male’s call is also described as fire fire, where where, here here, see it see it.

Unlike many American songbirds, the indigo bunting is not declining significantly in numbers, ornithologists tell us. One reason may be their liking for edge habitat, something that is generally plentiful.

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Joe Mosby is the retired news editor of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission and Arkansas’ best known outdoor writer. His work is distributed by the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. He can be reached by e-mail at jhmosby@cyberback.com.