Snow Buntings

Hagerville. ON. February 9th. 2021.  Another snowfall last night, light and very cold, the sort of snow that brushes off easily. In urban areas like ours, clean snow soon becomes trampled and grubby so it was with some pleasure that we went on a long drive to an area of rich farmland where the snow really did lie deep and crisp and even. 

With our errand complete and plenty of time in hand, we drove back along quiet country roads heading generally in the direction of home, expecting and hoping to see some birds of winter along the way: Horned Larks in particular (we saw several little flocks), and Lapland Longspurs or Snow Buntings if we were lucky. 

Knowing that Snow Buntings and longspurs were very much a matter of luck, I thought we should visit a quiet backroad where, in previous years, a birding friend Nancy has trapped and banded Snow Buntings. It’s something only possible in mid-winter when there’s a blanket of snow and I was gambling with favourable odds that she would be there today.  

Snow Buntings are winter visitors and congregate in flocks of a few hundred and favour open, apparently desolate places like their high-Arctic home, so farmland with some weedy fields is ideal. To get her buntings, Nancy provides a daily scatter of grain with some tantalisingly placed inside small walk-in traps. Some wander in, are unable to find the way out and once trapped are carefully collected, banded and quickly released. I worked alongside her one bitter January morning six years ago and suffered frostbite for my troubles, but still it is a beautiful experience on a bright winter morning with stark white fields under a clear blue sky. 

We were in luck arriving just as Nancy was finishing a busy morning of banding about 140, mostly female, buntings.  We watched as clouds of buntings settled to pick over the provided corn. After a few minutes, at some mysterious prompt, they would lift off in a twittering scramble, fly around like a rolling snowsquall and eventually regroup back at the same place to continue feeding.

There was a bit more to it than Snow Buntings: a small flock of Common Redpolls worked their way along the weedy roadside ditch and Nancy pointed out a Northern Harrier patrolling the margins of far hedgerows. Either of those two species might be bird of the day, but not with Snow Buntings as competition, who were definitely my Birds of the Day.