February 16, 2021 at 12:57 pm
It was a cold, overcast Saturday morning in Salem, Ore., when Jesse Laney set out to catch a glimpse of a painted bunting. He’d heard earlier that week through a birding WhatsApp group that this vibrant, rainbow-colored bird was in the area. Painted buntings (
Passerina ciris) are common in places like Texas and the northern parts of Mexico, but a rarity in Oregon. Laney and his sons raced to the site and began searching — but the bird eluded them.
He wasn’t too disappointed, though. Just the chance of seeing a rare bird “scratches the ever-present itch of participating in a small bit of discovery,” says Laney, an ecologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis.