Andy Caulton of Amherst couldn’t believe what he was seeing last Wednesday afternoon at MacDowell Reservoir in Peterborough
“I saw it on the bank, and I thought it was a Snow Bunting, but then I thought, how could that be?” Caulton said. “But then I got closer, close enough to take a picture, and it was in fact a Snow Bunting.”
Caulton, an avid birdwatcher and nature photographer, spotted the bird while his daughters, Greta and Izzy, were doing some Thanksgiving break fishing in the reservoir.
“Most of the reservoir was frozen, but the girls were fishing in the open spot, so I was over near them, and it was right there on the bank,” Caulton said.
Caulton, who is originally from England, said very few birders have ever spotted a Snow Bunting in New Hampshire.
“I’ve never seen one here. You see them on the coast of Maine. They migrate there, and then they fly back to the Arctic in March,” Caulton said. “They spend their winters in Maine — not at MacDowell.”
According to Audubon, the birds are about the size of a robin or sparrow, and make the 500-mile trip back to the Arctic tundra every spring.
Caulton describes the bird as “gregarious and busy, and always looking for seeds.”
Caulton says he posted his photo on a New Hampshire birdwatching site to confirm the bird’s identity with other birders, and got an immediate response from “others in the know.”
“Birdwatchers in New Hampshire can be very choosy about what they ‘like,’ and I got 63 ‘likes’ in an hour, which is something you never see,” Caulton said. “People were very excited about this. It’s a pretty cool thing.”