Debra Carr, 51, attracts painted buntings to her property in rural South Carolina by setting up 16 feeders brimming with white millet. When the kaleidoscope-colored birds arrive during their spring migration, usually in early April, she sets up a chair and watches them, keeping track of their numbers.

In North Carolina, Sue Stout, 65, of Southport also spends five to 10 hours a week watching her millet feeders from a sunroom and counting the painted buntings.

"When we started getting painted buntings here, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven," Stout says.

As a child, she'd scribbled the bird's fanciful shades in a color-by-number book and daydreamed of seeing them in her yard.

Carr and Stout are two of the 1,735 citizen scientists volunteering for the Painted Bunting Observer Team. Their observations are fed into a database managed by a group of scientists in the Carolinas who are mapping the distribution and abundance of eastern painted buntings from Florida to southern coastal North Carolina.

Volunteers have produced 54,629 data points since the program began in 2005, led by Jamie Rotenberg, an assistant professor of environmental studies at UNC Wilmington. About 600 volunteers log sightings at any one time, Rotenberg says, with active reports rolling up or down the Atlantic Coast as the birds migrate north or south.

The eastern painted bunting was thought to be in trouble until very recently. Its population declined by 2.7 percent to 3.2 percent annually, and scientists say it has nose-dived since 1966. But Rotenberg says a recent report by the U.S. Geological Survey analyzed data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey and found that the population began increasing in 2002, at least compared with previous estimates. Rotenberg could not reveal if it was increasing a lot or a little, saying that this will be included in a report that is in progress.

A growing population?

In a similar vein, the Eastern Painted Bunting Working Group, a consortium of researchers to which Rotenberg belongs, issued a statement last fall saying that after an extensive three-year analysis, they found "an overall population size much larger than previously expected."

"This doesn't mean we should stop paying attention to it," Rotenberg says. "It's still not out of the woods."

Scientists offer several reasons for the decline from 1966 to 2002: Loss and degradation of the coastal scrub habitat tops the list, and parasitic cowbirds could also play a role (they lay their eggs in the nests of songbirds, and their nestlings outcompete the natal birds' offspring). But the greatest unstudied factor occurs outside the U.S. An unregulated harvest of mature male birds in Cuba and the Caribbean excises an unknown number of eastern painted buntings annually from a population roughly estimated (as of last summer) to number only 100,000 to 150,000. Trapped wild painted buntings are sold as caged songbirds. It is illegal to trap or harm nongame migratory bird species in the U.S.

Seed feeders may be a driving factor in the birds' increase, Rotenberg speculates. Eastern painted buntings may be able to muster through habitat destruction and degradation so long as they have supplemental food supplies, he says. Preliminary trends from the PBOT study bolster his idea. An increase in wildlife-friendly agricultural practices, plus climate change, may have also helped the Eastern population of painted buntings.

Rotenberg and John Gerwin, curator of birds at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences, are recruiting backyard feeder watchers in the Southeast to help them better understand the species' breeding, feeding and habitat needs in order to better protect it.

Insights about buntings

Rotenberg says the Painted Bunting Observer Team is uncovering insights, like how the average lifespan of a painted bunting may be several years longer than the five-year longevity of most passerines, and how the birds exhibit a strong loyalty to specific sites and even individual feeders to which they return year after year. But the data nugget he really wants to get at is a characterization of the eastern painted bunting population. Precisely how many are there? What habitat do they use? What's the sex ratio? Where do the birds that breed in the Carolinas go in the winter?

"We borrowed our methods from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Great Backyard Bird Count and Project Feeder Watch, so we're pretty confident in our data," Rotenberg says.

He also is banding painted buntings in North Carolina, and asking observers to report band colors they may spot in order to help the researchers track movements of individual birds.

"We see some dispersion with the juveniles, but we usually recapture them within 1 to 5 kilometers of where they were first caught," Rotenberg says. "But with the adults, we have recaptured some individuals year after year at the same exact feeder."

Rotenberg says the banding has shown that eastern painted buntings - which summer and breed from southern coastal North Carolina south to the coastal plain of Georgia - travel to Florida and Cuba during their winter migration. Some birds that he banded at Bald Head Island were observed and recaptured in Stuart, Fla.

Rotenberg estimates he's banded 2,800 eastern painted buntings, and he says he's recaptured more than a thousand of these. His recapture rate is higher than average because of the birds' strong site fidelity, he says. The PBOT will run through 2012, then he will analyze the six years' worth of data.

Gerwin, Rotenberg and other entities, including the Audubon Society, have worked to get the painted bunting listed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, so that trappers would be required to report their harvests. Rotenberg says a four-state study due out soon, spearheaded by the Fish and Wildlife Service, should provide the most up-to-date eastern population estimate. He did not want to leak information about the numbers before the report was final, and would only say that the population "appears to be increasing."

This is a good thing, considering the price these birds pay for their beauty.