They are seed eaters like sparrows, and may also eat such tiny creatures as they find along the beach, and they are always flocking and scattering out from one rise and level to the next. To me, the fanciful difference between buntings and sparrows, sanderlings, gulls, horned larks, and many other visitors to seaside lands is their trait of invisibility. It is not only their whiteness--they look almost entirely white seen from underneath, appearing and disappearing like clouds--and a plumage which belongs to the accents of sunlight, grass stalks, dune shadows, on the bare ground--but their actions. With a motion reminiscent of the roller-coaster type of flight which the goldfinches have, flocks of buntings will pour down onto the cliff top or beach, spread out and then fly up again, with an inner billowing, a dipping, and rising as they go. Twittering with a note of tinkling bells in the high air beside the bowling sea, they swing and then burst in gentle snow flights across the ground, through one opening, one neat run, one clean escape to another. They turn the invisible into reality. They have a continual lift, the agitation inherent in all life. They fly up ahead of me as sparks out of the unseen rest and center of things. Another bird of the tundra, a specter from the far north which appears irregularly over the years during wintertime to hunt for rodents and occasional birds along the coast is the snowy owl. I remember seeing a mounted specimen when I was a boy and thinking it was the most desirable thing on earth to own, and since I never did own one, the snowy owl stayed intangible and magnificent in my mind; and the first live one I ever saw did nothing to disabuse me of my impression. They migrate to beaches, salt marshes, and islands along the coast, choosing elevations as a rule, hummocks, knolls, or dunes from which they can survey the surrounding countryside during their hunting season, watching the man or beach buggy arrive as well as evidence of prey. The one I saw was way down the south end of North Beach, that stretch of Nauset beach which ends at the straits separating it from Monomoy. It was perched on a hummock, and at first was nearly indistinguishable from the top of a white picket fence buried in sand, or the kind of white marble marker, rounded at the top, which you might see on a roadside in Vermont. We were driving toward it in a beach buggy and when it flew off low with big, soft, bowed wings, its feathers, white and flecked with gray, took on a blue-ash hue from the winter light and the uneven shadowy land around it. The great owl lighted calmly on another hummock further on. It stared straight at us out of fierce yellow eyes, with inscrutable dignity, and when we turned and came at it from another direction its head almost swiveled all the way around, looking at us from over its back. It kept its place in center stage.