Snowbirds

About the time when the leaves are all gone and the fields are bare and brown, the snowbirds drift in as softly as though their flight was part of the coming snow itself. They come without warning. One day the fields are barren of life and of a sudden the sere brown stretches seem to lift and life is again among them.

Beautiful birds, these snow buntings with their white flash of wings, their fawn-marked sides and backs, but more delightful than anything else is their ability to take to the air. No effort here whatever, a whole flock taking wing in the most perfect unison imaginable, as though in obeyance to a signal. And then again, after a careening swoop and circling over the ground, they alight as softly as the element for which they are named.

Once I saw a flock of them fly into a patch of tall weeds, bounce their bodies against the dry, brittle, seed-laden stalks, circle once and then drop down to feed on the harvest spread out before them on the crust. When the seeds from this first assault were gone, they took to the air again in mass formation, banked swiftly and once more struch the hedge of weeds. Time and again they did this until the seed pods were empty of their treasure and only then did the birds move on to other pastures.

Many times, I have stood in a duck blind watching the skyline for a sign of wings and suddenly become aware of the flashing flight of the buntings, mistaken them at first for bluebills or buffleheads above the rice and then, without warning, found them on the shore before me feeding on the washed up seeds of sedge on the shallow flats.

And always it has been the same, the feeling of surprise, their almost uncanny way of drifting out of the sky without announcement. No matter how often it happens, they never cease to thrill me, not only because of the way they come in or because they are beautiful and lend a note of color to a landscape rapidly growing drab, but because I have come to expect them as a part of the picture of transition between the late days of autumn and the early ones of coming winter.

Just before the coming of the first real blizzards, they are gone, as swiftly and as silently as they came in, taking with them a certain lightheartedness and joy from the landscape. To me, their cheerful twittering, their airy drifting over the fields and lakeshores seems to be a last gesture of life and gaiety before the onslaught of the cold. I like to see them come in out of the north, and I hate to seem them go, these buntings, forerunners of the drifting snows.