Colorado State Bird

The Colorado State Bird is the Lark Bunting. This Colorado bird was made official on April 29.1931. To put it in perspective, my father was three months old when Colorado adopted this bird. Wow!

The Lark Bunting is a songbird that migrates back and forth, showing up in Colorado in April and leaving again in September to winter down south in Texas and in Mexico. While in Colorado, flocks of these sparrow-type birds stay in the Colorado plains and in places in Colorado up to 8,000 feet up from sea level.

The male Lark Bunting is a black bird with white patches on his wings and white edging along his tail and parts of his body. During the colder months, the male turns grayish brown, just like the female. The difference is that the female is gray brown on the top and white underneath her body. She stays these same colors all year long. The male bird is six to seven inches long and the female is just a little smaller.

The Lark Bunting makes its nest on the ground in a grassy place or under a shrub. The female usually lays three to six bluish-green eggs, sometimes with reddish-brown speckles on them. They take 10 to 12 days to hatch. Both the mother and the father Lark Buntings take care of the eggs before they hatch and feed and take care of the little ones once they hatch.

These pretty birds eat a lot of bugs such as ants, beetles, and grasshoppers. They also eat some grain and the seeds from wild plants. The longest this bird can live is four years.