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Snow Bunting
Order: Passeriformes
Family: Emberizidae
Genus: Plectrophenax
Species: nivalis
La. passer sparrow, small bird
La. forma form, kind, species
Swiss-German emmeritz bunting
or yellow hammer
Gr. plektron rooster's spur
Gr. phenax imposter (refers to
the hind claw)
La. nix, nivis snow
La. nivalis snowy |
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| About seven inches long and plump.
Predominantly white on whole head, neck, rump, and underneath. Wings mixed black and
white. Black scapulars (upper wing feathers), inner secondaries (middle wing feathers),
end half of primaries (longest wing feathers), back and inner tail feathers. Darker
in the autumn gradually becoming more white again in winter.
The distribution in this map may be in laditudes too low to represent the breeding season
for Snow Buntings.
A bird of the tundra, circumpolar in the Arctic
regions, Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, northern Scandinavia and
Siberia migrating south in the autumn to the Scottish Highlands, over
Europe, eastern Asia, Canada and the U.S., appearing around Hudson Bay
around September and further south in about another two months reaching
the upper U.S. around December. A few have been recorded
nesting as far south as the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
Normally they do not winter further south than Illinois or New York, but
occasionally they wander as far as Kansas and Virginia.
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Forced south not by the severe cold and deep snow
cover so much as the deprivation of its food source, moving northward
again as early as February.
They are content playing
and singing during snow storms when the temperature is thirty degrees
below zero.
Builds warm bulky nests of stems, grass
and moss lined with feathers and fur hair in rock crevices on barren hillsides, in
cavities in sand banks and in nestboxes.
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R. Bruce Horsfall
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| Lays three to
seven dull white speckled eggs with a faint blue-green tint. Ground
feeders of various seeds, buds, insect larvae and small shell fish.
Flocks forage for weed shoots penetrating snow covered fields. |
| They walk and do not hop,
rarely perching in trees, sometimes on a fence or structure.
The
Snow Bunting nestbox has a
5" by 5" floor, 8" inside ceiling, 1 3/4" diameter entrance hole
located 6" below the roof and ventilation openings. Screw assembly and
hinged roof is secured with shutter hooks for easy access. Mount on a post or the
wall of a house or shed. Resources |
Snow Bunting Nestbox
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