Haldimand County, ON. January 27 2022. I don’t care much for January birding. Others do and I respect their choices, up to them. But standing on the Lake Ontario shore scanning the ice-cluttered waters for wintering Arctic ducks is not for me. I know it can be productive and perhaps is best done in the company of a car-full of friends. My most satisfying winter birding entails a warm-car drive to snow-blown fields south of here looking for a few specific birds, Snow Buntings being the most sought-after.
I hit it perfectly this morning, my first real getaway after a couple of weeks of indoor living enforced by repeated snowfalls and ice-encrusted everything. I was in farmland of wide-open sweeps. On days like today, with the temperature around -6 C, the buffeting wind drives snow squalls that lay thick tongues of drift across the road; I was glad of all-wheel drive.
I was hoping for Snow Buntings but had to wait a while. I quartered a neighbourhood, watched a swaying American Kestrel on an overhead wire, looking down attentively. Once or twice I caught sight of Rough-legged Hawks and Northern Harriers, riding the roller-coaster winds and searching the fields for rodent meals. At the junction of two minor roads, a large and busy flock of American Tree Sparrows had gathered and was picking through the left-overs of a roadside grain spill.
Eventually I found my way to my Snow Bunting site. The only difference between this anonymous stop along a wind-blown road and hundreds of others like it, is that a friend, Nancy, is there daily to band buntings. She’s been doing it for years and I post about it almost every winter. She attracts them with a reliable scattering of grain, she gently traps, weighs and measures them, places an aluminum band on their right leg and lets them go. The data she and others gather is building a picture of the life cycle of this engaging species.
There’s lots about Snow Buntings that make it a privilege to see them: They’re mid-winter visitors who nest in the high Arctic and make their way down here for the winter. They gather in nomadic flocks that favour wide open, weedy fields and seeing a flock on the move is to think you’re watching a rolling snow squall; They are unquestionably cute – and that from someone who tries not to get overly sentimental about birds, preferring adjectives like spectacular, instructive or fascinating.
Getting out of the car would have only made them take flight but I was able to get a few photos of buntings on the road ahead. Nancy explained that there had been quite a bit of spillage of harvested grain on the road last summer. While no longer apparent to us, I imagine road traffic had crushed and scattered the corn and the buntings had no trouble finding it; also accounting for the large flock of American Tree Sparrows a little earlier.
