Field Notes—

Snow Buntings:

A Little Light On The Darkest Day

By Curtiss Clark

Watching the great commercial apparatus of the Christmas holiday collapse in on itself in the whimpering supplication of January “sales events” brings a perverse pleasure to me. I don’t think anyone in their maturity finds true satisfaction in the frantic churn of consumer goods at Christmastime, but the process particularly wears on me as I grow older. Outside the enchanted snow globe of childhood imagination, Christmas can be a trifle glaring, so I am always happy to receive January’s invitation to move ahead to something new.

These dark days and weeks following the winter solstice are made for seekers. It is the nature of darkness to sharpen the eye and whet the appetite for light. We scan the horizon for something, anything, to leaven the weight of the winter night.

This year, I was lucky and received a gleaming gift straight from the arctic circle thanks to the sharp eyes of my friend Dottie Evans. Dottie called me on the shortest day of the year to say that she was pretty sure she had seen a small flock of snow buntings on her daily dog-walking trek up to the high field at Fairfield Hills. In an hour or two, I was up in the field myself, eyes up, scanning the horizon for this rare visitor from the north. I should have looked down.

Just ahead of me on the lane through the field, about 30 brown and white birds were scuffing around in the grit. As I approached, they whisked themselves into the air, frothing the leaden sky with their white undersides, folding around and over me in skeins, and coming to rest back in the gritty lane behind me. Dottie was right; they were snow buntings. I had only seen them in pictures, usually in the black and white mating coats they wear in the spring on the barren open habitats of circumpolar tundra. But here they were, in Newtown, in their traveling clothes, eluding a man on a hill like childhood memories.

I watched them for about 20 minutes. Every time I approached, the compact flurry-of-a-flock took to the air again to pitch and yaw like a breeze made visible. I had the odd sensation of remembering something that had never happened to me before.

Snow buntings have been migrating to these southern fringes of their range since the time when New England was as lonely a place as their boreal breeding grounds. They travel the arc of an ancient swinging pendulum ticking off centuries to the eternal cadence that created us all. Perhaps this is why they seemed so familiar to me on our first meeting.

That pendulum may be slowing for the snow buntings. Global warming is transforming their arctic breeding grounds, thawing open tundra earlier in the season and sprouting new vegetation that crowds nesting areas. The warmer weather also supports larger populations of predators that raid the bunting’s nests. Greenhouse gases may well melt the connection between the reality and the memory of these birds in time.

For now, I hold the light of the snow buntings’ white bellies on a dark winter day as cause for hope – bright flecks of possibility in the snow globe of my own jaded imagination.

I went back to the field in Fairfield Hills the following day, and they were gone. My hope is that they are not gone forever.