February 9 2013. My mind has not been on winter birding lately, but yesterday we received about a foot of snow and that got me thinking of Snow Buntings. To cut a long story short, this morning I ended up sitting in a cold minivan at the side of a windswept country road helping with a spot of banding.
Snow Buntings were the target species, so in a sense they were Bird of The Day. But the cuteness competition was fierce, Snow Buntings flock together with Lapland Longspurs and Horned Larks, and this morning two Common Redpolls picking at the dried seed-heads of some goldenrod added charm to the morning.
There’s a small group of dedicated academics and citizen scientists who study Snow Buntings; they’re trying to establish the links between various breeding populations and where they spend the winter. We know Snow Buntings breed above the Arctic Circle in North America, Greenland and Eurasia, and we also know they spend the winter further south in our latitudes. But who goes where is the question. With almost no-one to observe and study them on their breeding grounds, precious few to check on them in the winter months and vast distances between winter and summer grounds, not a lot is known about them. Where do ‘our’ winter Snow Buntings breed; and how do they get there?
I am no authority on this, but it appears that Snow Buntings who breed on islands in Hudson Bay, head towards Canada’s prairie provinces for the winter. Further, there’s some evidence that, in April our winter populations make their way to Greenland via the north shore of the St. Lawrence River and then north through Labrador. Such evidence comes in little pieces and maybe one of today’s birds will add to our knowledge in a couple of months.