This listing is for a limited edition, fine art print of my original painting of a Lazuli Bunting called, “You Should Smile More.”

There’s a quizzical look on this bird’s face that could be interpreted a number of ways, but something in me looked at his expression this evening, and the title just popped into my head. This likely comes from the look that might appear on my face when someone tells me to smile more. Yeah, thanks.

Anywho…

Bird in a Box subscribers: this is the bird for June 2018.

More about the Lazuli Bunting

from Audubon:

Conservation status	Widespread and common, numbers apparently stable.
Family	Cardinals, Grosbeaks and Buntings
Habitat	Open brush, streamside shrubs. Breeds in brushy areas with open grassy ground nearby, such as patches of scrub oak, chaparral, streamside thickets, sometimes in areas of sagebrush or pinyon-juniper woods. In migration and winter, occurs in weedy fields, open woods, brushy places.

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.