FWC Press Release:

The Painted Bunting Observer Team (PBOT) Project at the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW) needs your assistance with these brightly colored migratory birds.

The team is looking for volunteers to help with a research study in Florida to develop strategies to bring the bird’s population up to healthy and sustainable levels.

“Although past data from the Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) show that painted bunting populations were declining for 30 years, more recent data, along with detailed monitoring, indicate that these birds appear to be on the rebound,” said Dr. Jamie Rotenberg, ornithologist in the Department of Environmental Studies at UNCW. “Still, the good news is tempered by uncertainty surrounding the causes for the recent rebound or whether the population is doing well on both the breeding and wintering grounds.”

The painted bunting's decline may be caused by a variety of factors, including increased coastal development and more intensive agricultural practices, both of which clear scrub-land vital to breeding birds, according to Mike Delany, a biologist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s (FWC) Wildlife Research Laboratory in Gainesville.

“The recent turnaround in the painted bunting population may be due to a suite of factors, including more people feeding birds at backyard feeders,” Delany said.

In North Carolina and Florida, painted buntings typically breed in a narrow range along coasts and waterways. In South Carolina and Georgia, the birds also favor the coast, but breed well inland in low country scrub and young pine stands. As coastal habitats continue to be developed and as more inland scrub is cleared, these birds are losing their homes.

“Florida is unique in that it is the only one of the four eastern breeding ground states that also supports a wintering population of painted buntings,” Delany said.

In Florida, the team wants to recruit and maintain an active group of volunteers who can make observations and collect data at backyard bird feeders and can help band and monitor banded buntings, especially during the winter months.

“We hope to determine the abundance and distribution of painted buntings at backyard feeders and to detect population patterns across the coastal-inland and suburban-rural landscapes,” Rotenberg said. “We want to know if there are differences in how males and females use feeders and how important these backyard feeders are as a food resource. Already, just from last year’s data, we may be seeing a winter-range expansion for painted buntings in Florida, possibly because of backyard feeders. Ultimately, we want to find out why the species was in decline and pinpoint what is causing the new increase.”

Since painted buntings readily visit backyard bird feeders, volunteers can easily participate in gathering a variety of data that can aid the project in comparing populations breeding in suburban, rural and natural habitats, from the coast to more inland areas.

Last year, Rotenberg and his colleagues had more than 13,000 data hits to their Web site - www.paintedbuntings.org - from volunteers in the Carolinas and Florida, and the team captured and banded more than 600 painted buntings. The banded birds allow the team to learn about migration, site fidelity, lifespan and survival rate, reproductive success and population growth, as well as the behavior of individual birds.

“When we began, most of our volunteers wanted to know if the same birds were returning to their feeders every year,” Rotenberg said. “With the bands, our volunteers can actually identify individual birds and know if the same ones are visiting.”

Each painted bunting receives three pre-determined colors and one silver band with inscribed numbers. The silver band is a federal band from the U.S. Bird Banding Laboratory. The bands are easily viewed with binoculars.

“We put four colored bands on each painted bunting. That color combination is unique to that individual bird,” said Laurel Barnhill, bird conservation coordinator for the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources. “This allows observers to identify and distinguish a particular painted bunting from all the rest. For example, in 2009 a homeowner in Stuart, Fla. recorded a bird wintering at their feeder 23 times from January through April. This individual was originally banded at Bald Head Island, N.C. in August 2008.”

This December, Rotenberg will be conducting several PBOT workshops around Florida to help with the “how-to” part of being an observer, as well as providing basic information about the species.

“My workshops cover all aspects of our citizen science-based project, from basic identification and counting of individual male and green birds to more detailed information - including reporting band colors, visit frequencies and duration at feeder behaviors,” Rotenberg said. “All these data collected by our volunteers allow us to achieve our project objectives, including determining painted bunting population demographics and the importance of feeders on the wintering ground in Florida.”

The dates and locations of the workshops are being finalized, according to Rotenberg. For updates about the workshops in Florida or to become a Painted Bunting Observer Team volunteer and learn more about the project, please sign up on the project Web site - www.paintedbuntings.org - or e-mail the project coordinator at pbot.mns@ncmail.net.