Bird Biographies

								


    characteristic way of "hugging the ground" when walking or

    running--it does not hop.
Male and Female: In winter: head brown on top, lighter on neck; white

    on sides of head, with a brown thumb-mark below eye; back brown,

    streaked with black; throat and belly white; a broad brownish band

    across breast; a brownish wash on sides and rump; wings black and

    white, some of the feathers edged with brown--in flight, the wings

    appear white, broadly tipped with black; inner tail-feathers black,

    outer feathers white. In summer: back and shoulders black, the

    rest of the body white; wings and tail black and white.
Notes: Thoreau calls their note "a rippling whistle." He says also,

    "Besides their rippling note, they have a vibratory twitter, and

    from the loiterers you hear quite a tender peep."[19]
Habitat: The tundras of North America. Snow buntings breed in the

    treeless regions of the North; they migrate southward during the

    winter.
Range: Northern Hemisphere. In North America, they breed from 83° north

    (including Greenland), to the northern part of Canada and Alaska;

    winter from Unalaska and south-central Canada to northern United

    States, irregularly to northern California, Colorado, Kansas,

    southern Indiana and Ohio, and Florida.
Snow Buntings, or "Brown Snowbirds" as they are called to distinguish
them from the juncos, or "Gray Snowbirds," are not generally known
because of the infrequency and irregularity of their visits. They belong
to the Sparrow family, but have so much black and white on their wings
and tail as to appear very unlike their relatives.
Snowflakes are gentle, fearless little birds, possibly because they come
from the sparsely settled regions of the North, where they need not
learn to fear human beings. Like chickadees, they appear to love driving
storms, and to frolic during February blizzards with as keen delight as
warmly clad children; like tree sparrows, they are protected by a layer
of fat that keeps out the cold. As they, too, are seed-eaters, snow
buntings must journey southward during the winter to regions where deep
snows do not bury the weeds.
Few people are aware that in the treeless plains of the north there
lives a bird that resembles the much-admired skylark of England in its
way of singing. Both snow buntings and skylarks begin to sing as they
rise from the ground, sing while on the wing or high up in the air, then
drop swiftly to the ground.
Dr. Judd writes as follows about the snowbird: "The snowflake is a bird
of the arctic tundra, above the limit of tree growth. In North America
it breeds about Hudson Bay, in the northernmost parts of Labrador and
Alaska, and to the northward. In its northern home it is a white,
black-blotched sparrow, of whose habits very little is known, except
that it makes a feather-lined nest on the ground, in which it rears four