Karen Williams, age 14, of Lake City, S.C., for her question:
WHAT EXACTLY IS A SNOWBIRD?
Several members of the bird world seem to belong to the snows of the polar regions. In Antarctica, the gull type snow petrel nests farther south than any other bird and his satin smooth plumage is said to be whiter than the surrounding snow. In the Northern Hemisphere, the snowbird is the snow bunting, which nests farther north than any other bird.
Come spring, a variety of perky little bunting birds arrive to nest in our shrubs and trees. In the fall, they gather in flocks and fly south to warmer winter climates. This is when their cousin, the snow bunting, may pay us a surprise visit from his home in the far north. The snow bunting, alias the snowflake, alias the snowbird, truly belongs to the snows and when he visits us he usually arrives with a blizzard.
This chubby little bunting is a sparrow like bird of the finch family, fond of seeds and bugs and a born. One would expect a genuine snowbird to be plain, pure white. However, the plain white snow petrel of Antarctica tends to stand out against his snowy background. The snowbird bunting of the Arctic wears winter white with rusty streaks on his back.
This color scheme tends to blend perfectly with his wintry surroundings. When he tumbles along with a blizzard, he looks like an old blowing leaf. When feeding on the ground, he blends in with tufts of dead grasses.
The snowbird may stay with us for a while, during the worst of our winter season. But in early spring he takes off for the northern tundra. There, during the Arctic summer, he molts his winter white and wears a more suitable outfit of blended black and white.
His nesting grounds may be in northern Canada, Iceland, around the shores of Greenland or the northern tip of Scandinavia. Baby snowbirds are born closer to the North Pole than any other birds. Other buntings build their nests in the bushes, but there are no bushes on the treeless tundra. The thick walled nest is built on the ground from dried Arctic grasses and tenderly lined with feathers that fall from visiting water birds.
The female snowbird sits on the nest while the male flies aloft to sing his song. Later he gathers an endless supply of bugs and grubs to feed his hungry chicks. Soon the entire family comes forth to scratch for morsels of assorted foods on the ground. Instead of roosting in boughs, they rest and sleep near tufts of low growing grasses.