Arctic snowflake

Normally, neither my camera nor my knowledge is capable of producing decent bird images but today we were lucky enough to get a visit to Fishguard's northern breakwater which I blipped back in July. Normally out of bounds to the public, we were able to access this lonely concrete spit in the company of Cliff Benson, the moving force behind Seatrust, a conservation charity that observes and records marine wildlife around our Welsh coast. There's little that Cliff doesn't know about cetaceans and sea birds and much else besides. So thanks to him and his binoculars we were able to get a sighting of a remarkable little bird, the snow bunting Plectrophenax nivalis.

The snow bunting breeds in the high arctic, from Scandinavia through Russia and Siberia to Alaska, Canada and Greenland, choosing elevated ground or the rocky outcrops known as nunataks that protrude above the snow. In the winter they migrate south and may be seen on coasts and open country in flocks. Although in my bunting here is in its darker winter plumage, during the breeding season the males in particular are mainly white and thus known by the alternative name of snowflake.

I've long been fascinated by life in cold regions, so it was a thrill to encounter this little visitor. WH Hudson in his book British Birds (1895) suggests that the bunting is particularly welcome in its winter haunts on account of the desolate nature of those places and this is true of this long blank concrete wall that follows the course of the breakwater.

Hudson goes on to quote another ornithologist, Seebohm, who writes "In sledging over the snow across the steppes of south-western Siberia from Ekaterinburg to Tomsk, a distance of about a thousand miles, the snow-bunting was the only bird we saw... It was a charming sight to watch them flitting before the sledge, as we disturbed them at their meals. Sometimes, in the sunshine, their white bodies became invisible against the white snow and we could almost fancy that a flock of black butterflies was dancing before us. The flight of the snow bunting is peculiar and somewhat like that of a butterfly, as if the bird altered its mind every few seconds as to which direction it wanted to take....The male sings freely, sometimes as he sits upon the top of a rock, but often flinging himself into the air like a shuttlecock and then descending in a spiral curve with wings expanded, singing all the time.

Listen to the enchanting call of the snow bunting.