Painted Bunting song and call

A Painted Bunting sounds far plainer than it looks: a soft, sweet, varied warble of high, clear notes, loose and unstructured, delivered from a perch just above a thicket and usually before you see the singer. It is thinner and less patterned than an Indigo Bunting's paired phrases. Only the male sings. The call is a sharp, metallic tsick or a quick chip, and rival males will trade song back and forth for half a minute or more across a territory line.

What the song sounds like

The song is a series of high-pitched, musical notes, sweet and a little hurried, that wanders up and down without the repeated pairs of an Indigo Bunting or the buzz of a goldfinch. Audubon calls it loud, clear and variable; the Missouri Department of Conservation calls it a soft, varied, musical warble. Both fit, because it changes with distance: strong and ringing from a bird on a bare twig ten yards away, and a faint sweet tumble from inside the brush, which is where the bird usually is.

Only males sing, from March into July while they hold territories in dense low growth, and they are strongly territorial. Neighbors answer each other in vocal exchanges that can run thirty seconds or more, song against song, and that back-and-forth is often the best way to locate a pair of singers in a hedgerow.

The call: a metallic tsick

The call is a sharp, metallic tsick, also written chip or chit, short and easy to miss under the sound of a Texas afternoon. You hear it most from birds moving through cover or flushing from the ground, where they spend much of their time picking grass seed. It is a useful note because the bird itself is shy and secretive: a Painted Bunting that will not show itself will still chip at you from inside a tangle of vines.

When and where you hear it

There are two separate populations. The larger one breeds in the south-central states, from Kansas and Oklahoma through Arkansas and Louisiana into Texas and northern Mexico, with a small outpost in southern Arizona and New Mexico. The other holds a narrow strip of the Atlantic coast from North Carolina through coastal Georgia and South Carolina to northern Florida. In between, over most of the Southeast, the bird is absent, and in Missouri it is rare and confined to the southwest, present from May to September.

Look for it in semi-open country with dense low growth: brushy pastures, hedgerows, thickets along creeks and lake shores, woodland edges and clearings, and on the coast the scrub around maritime hammocks. Spring migration runs from early April to mid-May, fall from late July to mid-October, all of it at night and much of it across the Gulf of Mexico. Western birds stop partway along the route, in southern Arizona and northern Mexico, to molt before continuing; eastern birds molt before they leave. Winter is spent in south Florida, the Bahamas, Cuba, both coasts of Mexico and Central America.

Populations have declined in recent decades, mostly from loss of brushy habitat, and Audubon treats the species as a conservation concern. Males have long been trapped for cages: it was a popular cage bird until the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 made that illegal in the United States, and trapping still happens on the wintering grounds. In Texas and along the Carolina coast it is a card worth a special trip in Warble, and the soft song is the part you have to learn.

What it looks like

Sparrow-sized, about five inches and half an ounce, with a thick, conical bill. The adult male is the most colorful songbird in the country and looks it: blue head, bright green back, and red eye ring, throat, breast, belly and rump. It is also called the nonpareil, from the French for without equal. The female and young birds are green, lime green above and pale yellow-green below, with a pale eye ring. First-year males look like females, a little brighter, sometimes with a fleck of red or blue, and do not get the full colors until their second year. For all that paint, the bird is shy and stays low in cover, so most sightings are of a bright male on a song perch or a pair at a feeder where they have grown used to people.

Birds that sound similar

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  Indigo Bunting

  The Indigo Bunting sings in pairs, fire fire, where where, with a buzzy edge, from a high open perch. The Painted Bunting's warble is softer, sweeter and unstructured, and comes from lower down. The two share brushy fields across Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas.

• ?
  Blue Grosbeak

  The Blue Grosbeak sings a sweet, jumbled warble from the same thickets and hedgerows, and the two are easy to confuse by ear. The grosbeak's is longer and richer, and its call is a loud metallic klink, heavier than the bunting's tsick.

Where the Painted Bunting card lives

In Warble the same bird can be an easy card in one state and a prized one in another, because each album ranks its birds by how often people really report them there. The Painted Bunting appears in 3 state albums:

Questions people ask

Written by the Warble team from the sources above. Updated September 30, 2026.