You can hear an indigo bunting singing from a block away. Not only hear it, but see it as well. Indigo buntings seek the highest branches for their song perches, and they prefer dead branches with no leaves to obstruct the world’s view of their bright blue plumage.
The closest human equivalent to this fusion of sex and aggression is the old Bo Diddley song “Who Do You Love,” which begins: “I walk 47 miles of barbed wire / Use a cobra snake for a necktie / I got a brand-new house on the roadside made from rattlesnake hide / Got a brand-new chimney up on top made out of a human skull / Now come on take a little walk with me honey and tell me, Who do you love?”
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Somme Woods was the site of my second encounter this year with large numbers of indigo buntings. The first came in February in the Yucatan where I saw them hanging around the ruins at Chichen Itza. Their behavior was quite different in Mexico. The males were as subdued as the females, neither singing nor chasing each other about. Their plumage was quieter, too. They were just molting out of their brown winter feathers and into their bright blue breeding plumage, and they had the mottled and slightly raggedy look that birds get at such times.
Songbirds usually migrate at night, and captive birds display migratory restlessness in spring and fall, staying awake all night and trying to fly. Emlen confined restless buntings–one bird per cage–in funnel-shaped paper cages with transparent tops. He placed the cages so the birds could see the night sky but no terrestrial landmarks of any kind. He put an ink pad at the bottom of each funnel.
The northern sky is most helpful for navigation because the North Star appears to stand still and the stars near it appear to move in tight arcs around it. The birds use these northern stars in both spring and fall, flying toward them in spring and away from them in fall.
