A male snow bunting, Plectrophenax nivalis, perched on a rock encrusted with ice feathers.
Photographed in November at around 1100 metres on the Cairngorm plateau, in the Cairngorms National Park, Scotland, at first light.

The snow bunting is a truly Arctic species, with a circumpolar distribution and reaching further north than any other bird, even living on nunataks in the Greenland ice sheet.
Even these hardy birds stream south before the Arctic winter sets in though.
An estimated 9000 - 11,500 birds spend the winter in the British Isles, including the Cairngorms, where small ragged flocks trip around the plateau, or scavenge for crumbs around ski centre car parks.

A handful of snow buntings remain to breed each year among the cliffs and screes of the Cairngorms' highest summits, where they are at the southern limit of their breeding range in what is, effectively, a small piece of the Arctic slipped to the south.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it has been found that more birds stay to breed after late snowy winters.

Two races of snow bunting occur in Britain, the main one in winter being P.n.nivalis like this one, from Scandinavia and Greenland, which has a white rump and is strictly migratory.
The other race is the dark-rumped P.n.insulae, which lives in Iceland and is largely sedentary.

Both races breed in the Cairngorms, the proportion varying from year to year.
There are between 50 and 100 breeding pairs of snow buntings in Scotland, about half of these in the Cairngorms, the rest scattered through the north and west Highlands, including Ben Nevis.
The population fluctuates but shows no clear trend.

Location: Highland Region, Scotland.