A rare painted bunting bird stirs awe in Bartram’s Garden

Angie Lewis and her wife, Sara Beachy — avid birders from Cobbs Creek — drove to a vacant lot near Bartram’s Garden on Saturday morning, chasing a hot tip. Someone in their local birding community had mentioned spotting a rare bird in the area: the horned lark, an infrequent visitor to the city.

When they got out of the car, their jaws dropped, and all thoughts of the lark were forgotten. There on the sidewalk was an even more resplendent creature: a small bird the colors of a rainbow, a species of cardinal known as the “painted bunting.”

The bird’s almost electric blue, red, green and neon yellow plumage has captivated birders for centuries, and its nickname, “nonpareil,” means “without equal.” Adult male painted buntings — the ones with the shockingly vibrant feathers — are almost never sighted in Philadelphia. Especially in cold months, when they should be wintering in Florida and Mexico.

But here was this brightly colored traveler flitting from the sidewalk to the barbed-wire fence in a drab field littered with old tires and televisions and a burned-out car.

“Sara and I both gasped,” said Lewis, a member of the Philly Queer Birders, a local birding group. “I started to cry, and slowly pulled out my camera. We were in shock.”

When she could form the words, she called out to nearby birders, who quickly put the word to the Philly birding community that a painted bunting was in their midst. Crowds of birders have flocked to the slushy roadway every day this week.

“It’s a big event,” said Patrick McGill, a guide with BirdPhilly, a branch of the Delaware Valley Ornithological Club. In 2022, McGill, 45, broke a birding record when he spotted 251 different species of birds in Philadelphia within one year. But even he never saw an adult male painted bunting in this city.

“Just seeing that bright, colorful bird in that drab winter scenery is definitely thrilling for all our Philly birders,” he said.

Indeed, the bird’s surprising arrival to Philadelphia has sent a flutter of excitement through the Philadelphia birding community, a diverse group of avian enthusiasts who know that beauty is just as easily found among the lush greenways of the Wissahickon as it is on a lot penned in by a shuttered factory and railway bridge.

“It was a beautiful shock,” said Katrina Clark, a board member of In Color Birding, a Philly group founded during the pandemic as a safe space for local birding enthusiasts of color.

She rushed to the lot on Saturday morning after receiving an online alert. Birders armed with binoculars and high-powered cameras have maintained a constant vigil at the lot, where the bird spends his days snacking on the switchgrass and dodging the swooping hawks and feral cats who also call the lot home.

A TikTok video showing the bird lounging on the lot’s bare tree branches has been viewed nearly 30,000 times. Bartram Garden’s has been monitoring the bird’s location on its social media accounts. The bird has occasionally made its way into the garden’s meadows.

Birders are theorizing on how and why the bird decided to winter more than 2,000 miles from Mexico, its preferred migration destination. A juvenile painted bunting was spotted in Bartram’s Garden just last winter, but its appearance did not cause as much excitement. The younger bird had not yet molted its eye-catching plumage.

Perhaps it is the same bird that has returned, said Elise Greenberg of Philly Queer Birders, enjoying his exclusive bunches of switchgrass. Maybe it’s a different bird blown off course by storms.

“Birds do get their wires crossed,” she said. “It might have gone north when it’s supposed to go south. Birds do get their migration patterns messed up.”

Greenberg said that the sighting has raised excitement that goes beyond the die-hard birders always chasing rarities.

“It’s reaching an audience that isn’t always in tune with the interesting birds all around our community,” he said.

By Tuesday afternoon, about a half-dozen birders, rookies and veterans, were pointing cameras and binoculars at the field, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Painted Bunting. The sighting caps an eventful winter, said Rob Karchnyak, a long-time birder from South Philly. A Yellow-Breasted Chat, a Rough-legged Hawk, and an American Pipit, all relatively rare in these parts, have showed up in Philly this season. Then, there was the Tundra Bean Goose, native to Eurasia, seen splashing around Fairmount Park a few years ago. But none compares to the Nonpareil, the painted bunting.

“It’s surreal,” he said. Moments later, the bunting, playing to the adoring crowds, hopped up on the barbed wire. The birders went quiet with awe.