Walking up a grassy hillside at the Audubon Bobcat Ranch in Winters, CA, yesterday, we happened upon a Lazuli Bunting darting back and forth between an old oak and a fence. It was our bird of the day. The Lazuli Buntin, which winters along the West Coast of mainland Mexico, breeds along a large swath of California, Nevada, Oregon, Idaho and upward to Canada. As you can see from the photo, it's a great looking bird. Ours had a lot of blue, like this, but also some of that rust, and a little white in the chest. As you can see from the eBird maps below, the Lazuli Bunting has just recently come into California in the last month. As we can attest, they're quite a great bird to see. (photo by Dave Menke/USFWS)

Here's the map from the end of April, showing Lazuli Bunting all over the place:

Here's the map from the end of March. As you can see, they hadn't really begun to show up at all: