A favorite winter visitor to our shores is the wonderfully engaging Snow Bunting. Whether foraging on snow covered scapes or on windswept sand, they appear at first to the untrained eye to be convivial. Don’t let their social foraging habits fool. Snow Buntings spend a great deal of energy tussling amongst themselves for seeds, even snatching food from another’s beak. I have taken a number of images and much footage of little Snow Bunting fights and am looking forward to making a video of this behavior. In the meantime here is a short video taken on a super windy morning. Notice all the seaweed flies in the photo below. The tide was extremely high that day forcing all the flies to move out and up from the seaweed and onto higher ground, making for a very easily accessed breakfast.
Snow Buntings are Arctic specialist. They are ground dwellers with toes well adapted to snow and ice, which I think makes their toes also especially well-suited for running and hopping in the sand, along rocky shores, and in piles of seaweed. Their toes look like snowshoes as they bound about finding seeds buried in snowdrifts. When they are here in our region, I see them mostly feeding on insects found in seaweed and the intertidal zone, along with a variety of wildflower seeds.
“The snow bunting is the most northerly passerine bird in the world. It breeds in a circumpolar range, south to Scotland and Iceland, and it is a common breeder in suitable habitats in northern Scandinavia, Greenland, Svalbard, arctic parts of Russia and the northerly parts of North America.” However, the species is in significant decline in North America with reasons ranging from habitat redistribution to the heavy use of pesticides in croplands where the birds feed heavily during the winter months.
A snowy morning flock of Snow Buntings from a year ago January
