Wings, tail, and
lower back with brownish wash, most prominent in autumn
plumage. Quills of wings and tail deep blue, margined with
light.
Female -- Plain sienna-brown above. Yellowish on breast and
shading to white underneath, and indistinctly streaked. Wings
and tail darkest, sometimes with slight 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. Winters in Central America and
Mexico.
Migrations -- May. September. Summer resident.
The "glowing indigo" of this tropical-looking visitor that so delighted
Thoreau in the Walden woods, often seems only the more intense by comparison
with the blue sky, against which it stands out in relief as the bird perches
singing in a tree-top. What has this gaily dressed, dapper little cavalier in
common with his dingy sparrow cousins that haunt the ground and delight in
dust-baths, 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 considered by ornithologists in
classifying birds, the indigo buntings have several sparrowlike traits.
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