Snow Bunting — Wings of NH

What you notice first

A flock lifting off bare ground all at once — a scatter of white, the wings flashing like the first flurries of the season, before the birds resettle a little further on.

Voice

A soft, rippling "tew" and a buzzy "brzzt" from a moving flock; a sweet warbled song you'll only hear if one stops over in very early spring.

Where & when

Beach wrack and dunes along Hampton and Seabrook, stubble fields and manure spreads in the Merrimack and Connecticut valleys, and the wind-scoured gravel of the Mount Washington summit cone. November through February is prime.

An Arctic bird that treats a New Hampshire winter as the mild option. Snow Buntings nest on high Arctic tundra and rock — farther north than almost any other songbird — and the males return to those breeding grounds in April while it’s still deep winter up there, claiming crevices before the females arrive.

Here, they’re a flock bird of the bleakest open ground. In winter plumage they’re mostly warm buff and white with black-and-white wings; the buff wears away over winter so that by spring the males are nearly pure black-and-white without having moulted a feather.

Scan any flat, snow-blown field or the top of the beach after a storm. They feed on grass and weed seed, run rather than hop, and are easy to walk past until the whole flock erupts.