On the 4th my flight to Goose Bay from Blanc-Sablon didn’t leave until around noon giving me a chance to to do a little more banding with Vernon in the morning. We weren’t overwhelmed with numbers but did manage to catch 18 Snow Buntings (all males) and 1 Common Redpoll. But we got news that the buntings were on the move: Eva Luther reported 6 or 7 in St. Lewis (at the SE corner of Labrador) and then another 20 the next day showing signs that they had been feasting on berries; and folks in Happy Valley-Goose Bay reported sightings of up to a hundred.

Although we are getting into April there is still a lot of ice in the Strait of Belle Isla (as you can see in the photo below). In this photo the view is to the WSW, the direction that buntings would travel from on their journey to the Arctic following the St. Lawrence River route. Pretty barren, inhospitable looking country at this time of year. Causes me to wonder what they would find to eat along the way. Perhaps this is the reason that they are associated with river banks/coastlines – more chance of food.


The flight north to Happy Valley- Goose Bay (HVGB) was straightforward (except for the kid yelling in the seat behind me). The view was spectacular: frozen lakes and rivers with the ground still blanketed with snow.

As my main task was to band as many Snow Buntings as possible and to get other Labradorites(?) involved in the activity, I had to hit the road running in Goose Bay. Regina Wells picked me up and took me to one site that had recently been reporting Snow Buntings. There were only two there so we concentrated the cut corn bait that was somewhat scattered in preparation for putting traps down tomorrow and moved on to the next site, Carl and Elsie Olford’s backyard. There we found a group of about 60 birds sitting in a tree above the yard anxious to descend onto several bait piles that Carl had laid out. We put out 3 traps and left them opened; Carl said that he would set them first thing in the morning.

When I got going this morning, around 6:30, the air temperature was -12 C. This engendered high hopes. We got to Carl’s around 7 and found that a) true to his word he had set the traps at 6:30 and b) they were filled with hungry Snow Buntings and a couple of Common Redpolls. Eureka! I love it when theory and practice come together.

About this time Vernon Buckle showed up. He had to come to HVGB to have a toothache dealt with. He brought a couple of traps with him (which he set out at the first site) and joined us for the banding. We were also joined by a couple of other ministry people (Sara – who had also been in Forteau – and Kathleen, whose real specialty is mammals at risk (caribou and polar bears) but has seen the beauty of Snow Buntings…and it gets her out of the office.

I must say that it was one of the most pleasant banding experiences I’ve been part of. A good number of birds, keen kindred spirits, and the Olfords’ unstinting and very warm hospitality. In order to keep the birds from overheating we banded outside on the front porch but between batches we lounged inside drinking coffee, watching out the window and generally shooting the breeze about anything you could think of. But there was a looming problem: I was slated to do an interview for CBC radio with Heidi Atter, host of “Labrador Today” – CBC’s morning show. And we had run out of birds. Yikes! Now, without word of a lie (and it was too perfect to make up), at the exact moment that Heidi walked into the kitchen, a big bunch of birds walked into the traps!! Perfect. It’s always better to talk about Snow Buntings and banding with birds in the hand. It was an extensive interview. Her big job will be to edit it down to fit the available time slot. It will likely be aired on Tuesday. Show starts at 6:30 AM Atlantic time.

Then, of course, it was lunch time – Elsie’s delicious home-made chicken noodle soup. Again we had run out of birds but needed a couple to demonstrate banding for a couple of students that were coming after school. And, again, they now sooner walked through the door than birds walked into the traps. We whipped those off, finishing the day with 33 Snow Buntings banded (all males) and 8 Common Redpolls. For the day there were a couple of interesting firsts: Regina banded her first Snow Bunting and Carl lays claim to the heaviest Snow Bunting banded in Labrador this year (and the heaviest I’ve ever experienced) – it weighed in at 54 grams!! With no fat these birds weigh less than 30 grams. That’s an increase in body weight of about 80%. Amazing!! Making a migratory flight has sometimes been likened to a person running a marathon…for hours and hours on end. Can you imagine running at all with an increase of 80% in your body weight let alone running for hours?!

In total, we banded 314 birds – 310 males and 4 females for a male to female ratio of 77.5:1. Of the 310 males banded, 240 were ASY (After Second Year or “older”) birds and 70 were in their Second Year (SY) having been hatched last Summer for a ratio of 3.4:1 ASY:SY.

It was a whirlwind week for me – new beautiful territory, fresh birds, and wonderful people. I’d come back any time. Thanks to everyone that made it such a wonderful experience!!!
Rick

The April sun is hot. The wind blowing over the ice in the Strait of Belle Isle is chilling but get out of the wind and it’s very pleasant – not T-shirt weather perhaps but you certainly don’t need a jacket. The sun also is eating up the recent snow and there’s bare patches all over. But first thing this morning the buntings were hungry and they know where there’s a lot of good food and they piled into the traps to get at it. Consequently we had a pretty good day banding 73 and retrapping 39 from previous days – and one was a recapture “from away”. We’re waiting to hear who banded it and where. That’s the third one here. As things warmed up the attendance of the birds at the bait areas dropped. Even more so when a Northern Shrike showed up and tried to figure out how to get into the traps! The shrike really slowed thing down.

There’s no doubt that males migrate through here before females. With today’s catch we’ve banded 263 birds; of these 259 have been males. What’s also interesting is that older males, ASY or After Second-Year birds, seem to go through before younger or SY – Second Year males. But the gap between them is narrowing. On the 30th the ratio of ASY to SY males was 7:1; on the 2nd it was 4.2:1, and today it was 2.3:1. The younger or SY males can’t let the older birds beat them to the nesting grounds if they want to be able to compete for territories that would be attractive to females. There’s a lot of searching and defending that has to go on before the females arrive and it’s easier to defend a territory than to claim a new one or try to oust a bird in possession of one.
Rick

The wind picked up, no, surged during the night and when I woke up this morning I was in a blizzard with new snow being blown around by the winds creating white-out conditions on the roads. And, because I’ve been educating you to understand that you need cold and snow if you want to catch snow buntings, you recognized that these were the conditions I’ve been waiting for. When I got to Vernon’s house the traps, which he had set out 10 minutes before, were already full. We banded steadily throughout the morning; the pace didn’t tail off until the early afternoon when the wind began to drop and the temperature climbed above freezing. We ended up banding 111 Snow Buntings (bringing our total in Labrador to 195) and 1 Dark-eyed Junco. We also processed 23 buntings that we had banded on previous days.

We’ve often wondered what buntings do after they are banded and seem to leave the immediate bait site. It looks like they wander around the area searching out other patches of food. In the late afternoon we drove to a couple of birding “hotspots”. At one point, 3+ kilometers from our banding site, we passed a house with a busy feeder. A flock of ~30 Common Redpolls and 12 Snow Buntings flew up. The buntings landed on a nearby rooftop. Of the 12, we could see that at least 4 of them were sporting our yellow plastic bands. I guess they hit one restaurant, get their fill, and then move on to another. Probably a good idea to range around as concentrating in one spot might draw predators….and banders.
Rick

I started banding Snow Buntings in 2010. The next year (or maybe it was two) I got notification from the banding office that one of “my” birds had been recovered in St. Lewis, Labrador. I dug out some maps and located it: a small town on the SE corner of the province jutting out into the Atlantic. Ever since I’ve wanted to travel to St. Lewis and to meet Eva Luther, the person that recovered my bird. I finally got my chance today. The drive from Forteau was wonderful – a two-lane highway with almost no traffic that wound around old rocky mountains or dropped steeply into ice-filled river valleys. I had two wonderful sightings along the way: on the way there a timber wolf loped across the road about 50 meters in front of the car; on the way back we were passed by a moose travelling in the other direction but only 5 meters away from us.

Arthur and Eva Luther seem to be typical of the veteran Labrador folks: smart and ingenious and capable of getting much of their sustenance from the land: they hunt, fish, grow root vegetables and herbs, put up preserves (until today I’d never had partridgeberry or bakeapple jam – delicious); and they have the patience and wherewithal to fix just about anything that needs fixing. Eva has been feeding the birds at their home for a long time and has records of their arrival, attendance and numbers going all the way back to 1999. She has graciously offered to send me a copy of her notes.

Going into a community it’s good to seek out local knowledge about the wildlife. Both were very definite that numbers of many things were dropping; e.g., “snowbirds”, caribou. They also bore witness to the influx of “new” species: cormorants, sandhill cranes, blackbirds and grackles, even a Great Egret in recent years. All too soon we had to call an end to our visit and head back. But it had been wonderful to see for myself the town of St. Lewis and to meet the Luthers.


Rick