Your Birding Month

Birds to find include Dotterel, Chough and Spotted Flycatcher

The Snow Bunting is a curious bird in many ways, and you may think, an odd choice for a mid-summer Bird of the Month. Many of us only encounter these cute, white-winged seedeaters at the coast in mid-winter. But they are bona fide British breeding birds, albeit with a tiny population of some 60-odd pairs, in pretty specific habitat.

One of the odd things about Snow Buntings is that they are passerines that nest on top of high mountains (in the same sort of altitudes that Ptarmigans and Dotterels dare to dwell). Another is that they have a very distinctive summer plumage (unusual for a passerine), where, in the male the body is largely white, with a black mantle and the wings are white and black. It is almost like a Ptarmigan plumage transition in reverse; while Ptarmigans turn white to match the snow of winter, Snow Buntings are at their whitest to match the potential snow of spring and summer.

In winter, when white Ptarmigan stay put on snowy mountains, Snow Buntings mainly descend and most hit the coast and their plumage becomes browner to match the shoreline shingle and sand.

For those interested in taxonomy, the Snow Bunting and its relative the Lapland Bunting are no longer regarded as true ‘buntings’, but have been (for the last decade or so) in a separate, bunting-like family, the Calcariidae. This family is more closely related to the New World warblers than birds like the Reed Bunting or Yellowhammer.