What are the objectives of the Painted Bunting Research?
Our objectives are to: • Recruit and maintain an active group of citizen volunteers who would make observations and collect data at backyard bird feeders in suburban/rural areas and in designated private and/or protected areas. • Coordinate capture, mark-recapture and re-sight monitoring of color-banded buntings by agency participants, citizen volunteers, and university student-interns at a subset of these private and public protected areas. With these objectives, we hope to determine the abundance and distribution of Painted Buntings at backyard feeders and to attempt to detect population patterns across the coastal-inland and suburban-rural landscapes. We hope to find out if there are differences in how males and females use feeders, and to determine how important backyard feeders are as a food resource for Painted Buntings. Ultimately, we want to find out why the species is in decline and do something about it. We also hope to improve/enhance citizen awareness for the conservation o