Fróðskaparrit - 31.12.2000, Side 30

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THE SNOW BUNTING (PLECTROPHENAX NIVIALIS) AS FOOD

found 80,000 snow buntings destined for
the gourmet trade in a cold storage ware-
house (Parmelee, 1968: 1671).
In northern Scandinavia, the snow
bunting had the reputation of being able to
fatten itself in a few hours, thus, it was fat-
ter in the evening than in the morning. In
Fatmomakke in Lapland, a man that got fat
easily was said to be “as the snow spar-
row”. The saying in Angermanland was
similar: “You are as a snow bunting, you
lose flesh fast”; or “You are fat in the
evening and become thin in the morning”
(EU 17 790; ULMA 21019:12; ULMA 10
107). For lack of better food, Finnish
youngsters in Norrbotten often trapped the
snow bunting in the early spring with the
aid of horsehair snares (Bergfors and Nean-
der, 1930: 48). Jacob Fellman (1906: 93)
wrote that the Sami of Finland ate the deli-
cious meat of this bird. The Finnish Sami
preferred to catch the bunting in the
evening, since the meat was fatter at that
time. According to Knud Leem (1767:
255), the Sami of Finnmark noted how the
bunting was lean during low tide and fat
during high tide. Some Sami seem, howev-
er, to have disregarded it as a potential food
source. In 1931, for example, a Sami infor-
mant from Arvidsjaur told Edvin Brann-
strom that the capture or killing of this
small bird was widely disliked. Many Sami
regarded it as beautiful and considered it
nice company (ULMA 4373a). Until rather
recently, however, it was captured in great
numbers in northem Norway, and sold in
towns in the southern part of the country
(Flaftorn, 1971: 820).
Until World War II, the snow bunting
was used as food in northern Scandinavia.
There is much evidence from Lapland to
suggest that it was caught with snares of
horsehair. In many places, it seems to have
been a kind of entertainment for children to
capture the snow bunting, while it was im-
portant as food for the poor crofters in
mountain areas. According to Itkonen
(1941: 24), young boys among the Moun-
tain Sami in Inari used to capture them in
early spring. The fat, delicious birds were
boiled and eaten. Other sources from
southern Lapland and western Jamtland
confirm that it was mostly children who
were in charge of trapping the snow
bunting. A skilled trapper could catch hun-
dreds of the small birds in one day (Ekman,
1910: 199-200). For the children of Lap-
land, according to several records, it was
both exciting to catch the bird and a nice
change of diet to eat it, inasmuch as food
was sometimes scarce in the spring, and
very often monotonous in any event (Ryd
and Ryd, 1989: 18). An inhabitant of
Jukkasjarvi has explained that, during the
springtime, a full cauldron could be filled
each day with the delicious birds, even if
the family was large. It was not uncommon
for some fifty birds to be boiled at one time.
A big eater could consume twenty birds at
a single meal. In the years after World War
I, when food was rather scarce in Sweden,
snow buntings were sold for five ore each
(Tillhagen, 1978: 102).
Traps
Evidence of trapping is quite abundant,
both in the literature and in folk-life
records. There were several ways of catch-