We got an inch of snow during the night, enough to fully cover the local fields and bring hungry birds to the now clearly visible cut corn…most other food sources were covered. Throughout the morning mostly small groups of birds visited the traps. Flocks ranged from just a few to over 100 individuals. And the groupings were mixed: Snow Buntings, Horned Larks, and, to a much lesser degree, Lapland Longspurs.


Unlike yesterday, today they were going into the traps. We ended up banding 57 birds: 39 Snow Buntings, 14 Horned Larks, and 4 Lapland Longspurs. A few of the birds had, somewhere, been feeding in a manure pile as you could smell the stuff on the birds.

Usually we get more female Snow Buntings than males, but today we had 21 males and 18 females. Usually we don’t see this skewed sex ratio unless we’ve experienced a number of days of frigid Winter weather. Males tend to stay further north in Ontario or east along the St. Lawrence. I’m not sure why we were getting this number of males.

We also got an interesting retrap: #2691-71868. This bird, a female, was banded by David Lamble on February 19, 2015; it had been hatched in 2014.

Rick