120 
The Snow Bunting 
Winter 
Planting 
The careless landowner, for the lack of a few hours spent with 
a scythe in his pasture and old fields, promotes the growth of weeds 
that will not only choke his crops, but rob the soil of its fertility. Then 
comes winter, and while the man withdraws into his house thd band 
of feathered workers that are a great part of nature’s scheme of 
economics, silently appear, and without confusion fall to their allotted 
tasks : The Crossbills and Pine Grosbeaks, through their feeding, to 
plant evergreen forests; the Waxwings, to establish the pointed cedars 
on bare hillsides, drape the byways with bittersweet, and enmesh the 
thickets with catbriar ; the Myrtle Warblers to spread 
the persistent greenery of the bayberry, together with 
many other berry-bearing bushes ; while the gentle 
Snowflakes in the hollows, always keeping close to the ground, glean from 
the broken weed-stalks that have been overlooked by their kinsmen in the 
earlier season of plenty. 
In addition to this seed-food, the Snow Bunting is known to eat the 
larvae of small insects, and the minute shell-fish that attach themselves 
to the leaves of water-plants and rushes (upon the seeds of which they 
also feed), so that there is reason in this varied diet for the usual plump 
appearance of the bird. Upon this plumpness, indeed, depends its life, 
for it is the layer of fat beneath its skin that enables it to defy the cold. 
Surely, if any bird could be expected to receive hospitable treatment 
at human hands, one would think it would be given to these brave children 
of frost and snow, the Snowflake and Slate-colored Junco, yet myriads 
of these have fallen into the snares of the trappers for the sake of the 
mere mouthful of meat they furnish. In Europe formerly they were 
systematically caught in traps, when, after being kept and fed upon 
millet, they became in flesh and flavor the rivals of the famous Ortolan. 
A man from our own Yankee hill-country, who was a boy twenty 
years ago, told me once, as we stood watching the Juncos picking up 
mill-sweepings from under my feeding-tree, that “at home we always 
used to catch lots of those Gray Snowbirds every 
winter, in a box-trap. Good eating they were too — 
’bout as sweet and tasty as Reed-birds (Bobolinks). 
T’would be a poor winter we boys didn’t get a couple o’hundred on em. 
Since the blizzard year (1888) they sort o’shied off, and now that the law 
has set plump down on every sort o’snarin’, the country fellers either has 
to take bad risks or do with pork-meat in winter.” 
Small 
Game 
Classification and Distribution 
The Snow Bunting belongs to the Order Passeres, Suborder Oscines , and 
Family Fringillidce. Its scientific name is Plectrophenax nivalis. In North 
America it breeds in the Arctic Zone, and in winter visits southern Canada and the 
Northern States, occasionally appearing as far south as the Ohio River. Two sub- 
species inhabit the coasts and islands of Bering Sea. 
This and other Educational Leaflets are for sale, at 5 cents each, by the National Association of 
Audubon Societies, 1974 Broadway, New York City. Lists given on request. 
