Bird Watchers Digest - November/December 2010

Open-country

ID ENTIFY YOURSELF

Winter Birds
Lark, pipit, longspur, or bunting?

AlvAro JArAmillo

Iam the first to admit that I was not fond of growing up with a Canadian winter, although I do miss some types of winter birding. Winter owling was great fun, and so was looking for the open-country winter birds. I remember my first Lapland longspur like it was yesterday, on a side road near the town of Whitby, Canada. It was with horned larks in a stubble field, with drifting snow and a bit of that chilly wind of mid-February. Seeing this bird of the Arctic, which I had seen only on TV wildlife shows, was magical. For me, the benefit of winter was that several terrific Arctic species came south to us. Birds like snowy owl, rough-legged hawk, northern shrike, the longspur, and snow bunting made enduring the cold bearable.

The primary species to talk about
in a discussion of open-country win-
ter birds are horned lark, American
pipit, Lapland longspur, and snow
bunting. All of these are terrestrial
species; they live in wide-open habi-
tats—sometimes in grassy fields and
at other times in dirt fields, includ-
ing crop stubble from the previous
season. They may also congregate
on beaches adjacent to grassy areas.
They are flocking species, some-
times in single-species flocks and at
other times mixed.

Horned Lark

So, where to begin? How about the horned lark! Larks are found throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia, but the horned lark is the only native member of the lark family in the Americas. It is an amazingly adaptable bird. Horned larks range from the Pacific to the Atlantic coasts, from the high Arctic to Mexico—you can find them in virtually any open country in North America. In much of the Midwest and intermountain West, this bird is quite common, sometimes ridiculously abundant.