Lazuli Finch, Crimson-necked Bull-Finch, Gray-crowned Linnet, Cow-pen Bird, Evening Grosbeak, Brown Longspur

Around thickets and streamside trees of the West, this sky-blue bunting is common in summer. Males are conspicuous in summer, singing in the open, but the plainer brown females are far more elusive as they tend their nests in the thick bushes. During migration, flocks are more easily observed as they forage in brushy fields. Where Lazuli and Indigo buntings overlap in breeding range, on the Great Plains and parts of the Southwest, they often interbreed.

Adaptable, colorful, and cheery-voiced, the House Finch is common from coast to coast today, a familiar visitor to backyard feeders. Native to the Southwest, they are recent arrivals in the East. New York pet shop owners, who had been selling the finches illegally, released their birds in 1940 to escape prosecution; the finches survived and began to colonize the New York suburbs. By 50 years later, they had advanced halfway across the continent, meeting their western kin on the Great Plains.

The most widespread of our three species of rosy-finches, the Gray-crown nests from the islands of western Alaska south to the high mountains of California and northern Montana. Different populations are variable in size and in the amount of gray on the heads of the males.

Centuries ago this bird probably followed bison herds on the Great Plains, feeding on insects flushed from the grass by the grazers. Today it follows cattle, and occurs abundantly from coast to coast. Its spread has represented bad news for other songbirds: Cowbirds lay their eggs in nests of other birds. Heavy parasitism by cowbirds has pushed some species to the status of 'endangered' and has probably hurt populations of some others.

This chunky, big-billed finch wanders widely in winter, descending on bird feeders in colorful, noisy flocks, to thrill feeder-watchers and to consume prodigious amounts of sunflower seeds. Originally a western bird, almost unknown east of the Great Lakes before the 1890s, it now breeds commonly east to New England and the Maritime Provinces. Its eastward spread may have been helped by both the planting of box elders (a favorite food tree) across northern prairies, and the abundance of bird feeders in the Northeast.