The legend of the Painted Bunting was discovered in a diary reportedly found near the Mansion at Site: D. 3DSP scribe, Junius Wright transcribed the diary.

I found the dead bird in the back near the concrete steps. It was the blue tuft of feathers poking out of the leaves that first caught my eye. A tap of my toe told me immediately it was dead but also revealed a beautiful plumage of yellow, green, and red. It was the most beautiful bird I had ever seen. I took it to Ellie who was on the back screened porch folding laundry. Ellie was the local lady that watched me while my parents worked in the lab on the other side of the shipyard.

“Don’t you bring that thing into the house”. She said.

“But it’s beautiful.” I replied clutching the dead bird’s body by its frozen foot.

When Ellie saw the bird she stopped her folding and glared at me, “You didn’t kill it, did ya?”.

Her stern look and furrowed brow scared me, “No mam,” I found it out back in the leaf pile.

Typically Ellie never stopped her chores when I asked her questions, but this seemed to strike her as serious. She walked over to the storage closet on the porch and rummaged around the top shelf until she produced an empty shoe box.

“This will do”, she said. “Go get me a shovel; we need to bury this as quickly as possible.”

I grabbed the shovel and found her in the opening out back behind the garden.

“What kind of bird is it?” I asked.

“It’s a painted bunting and It’s mighty bad luck to find a dead one. We need to get it in the ground right away, so you start diggin and I will tell you the story”.

As I dug Ellie told me in a distant voice what she recalled about the Bunting.

“Last I saw a Painted Bunting was when I was just your age and I was walking down beside the cooper with my uncle. It was most beautiful and unlike yours it was still alive and singing. That’s when my uncle told me that the Painted Bunting was God’s bird because of all its colors. He said that there was a time long, long ago when the Painted Bunting was just a plain finch flying and flitting around the forest. Then one day he flew through a rainbow and that’s how he got a bit of blue, and bit of green, and bit of yellow, and a bit of red on him. That’s when God decided that the bunting was special. You see the blue represents the wisdom of God, the green is the green gardens of Eden, the yellow is the manna that fell from heaven, and the red is the blood of Christ.

By this point I had finished the hole. Ellie gently dropped the box and bird into the hole and I covered it with dirt and patted it into a smooth bump in the earth.

It was then that Ellie said, “It’s a real bad sign to find a painted bunting dead. No sir it’s not good. We are in for some bad times ahead.