Bird of the Month - November 2005
Snow Bunting
Plectrophenax nivalis
From late fall into winter, those who walk along an ocean beach or among the driftwood and dunes near river mouths along the northern California coast may find a small flock of Snow Buntings. Always rare here, these visitors from the Arctic provide a moment of cheer for birders alert to their largely white plumage and rattling flight calls.
Snow Buntings are found in spring and summer in the treeless Far North, nesting on tundra, at rock outcrops, and around human habitations. The Birder’s Handbook (Ehrlich et al. 1988) indicates that the nest is placed in a cavity, females incubate 4-7 eggs for 10-16 days, and nestlings fledge 10-17 days after hatching.
These sparrow-like ground birds are Holarctic, occurring all around the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. In fall, they move generally southward. In open country such as typifies the Great Plains, flocks of thousands may concentrate in harvested crop fields and, in snowy weather, along roadsides. Variable numbers appear annually in Washington and, less commonly, in western Oregon. Few indeed make it as far south as California, and the discovery of one or more Snow Buntings in the Redwood Region is always news.
Most of the Snow Buntings that have been found in northwestern California have been along the upper waveslopes of ocean beaches, in sparse drift material, or in dunes. Some, however, have appeared on jetties and breakwaters, and a few have shown up with flocks of ground-feeding birds in dairy pastureland. An intriguing aspect of this species’ irregular and restricted distribution in California is that several reports have come from the “mountain prairies” of Bear River Ridge and Cape Mendocino Ridge, where individuals occur in flocks of Horned Larks or longspurs.
Most Snow Buntings occurring in northwestern California tend toward the dark end of the plumage spectrum, looking like large, squat sparrows with mostly white underparts, white edges to the tail, and a lot of white in the inner wing. The breast is often smudged with rust at the sides, and rust or other brownish marks are noticeable on the head. The pink bill is small and conical. Rarely, Dark-eyed Juncos, House Sparrows, or other sparrows with abnormally great amounts of white or dilute plumage may suggest a Snow Bunting, and such birds have been misidentified as that species. Any bird that looks like a large Snow Bunting that also has much white in the wing coverts should be checked for the possibility of McKay’s Bunting, a similar bird breeding on Bering Sea islands that has strayed in winter to British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon, but has not yet been proven to make it to California.