The importance of snow cover (and elevation) on nest-box use in an alpine bird
Submitted by editor on 13 November 2025.
Living at high elevations means having to cope with extreme and unpredictable conditions. It also means that evolution has shaped for you a special relationship with snow. In fact, many alpine species exhibit strong associations with snow-related environments, which affect many aspects of their ecology and phenology. Yet, if evolution has made them strong in a snowy surrounding, climate change is now disrupting this equilibrium, by altering the timing of snowmelt and reducing snow cover. Despite this worrying scenario, the effects of snow cover variation and/or snowmelt timing on site occupancy in climate-sensitive species have been poorly studied, and no study had explored those effects along elevational gradients. So, there we were!
Our study species is the white-winged snowfinch Montifringilla nivalis, an alpine bird typically associated with snowy habitats, and snow cover affects many of its life-history aspects.
In Europe, the species is lucky enough to have a bunch of dedicated people from different European countries that take care of it, through monitoring and research on various aspects of its ecology, and that shares results and ideas (and nice meetings as well): the European Snowfinch Group.
In our study, we investigated patterns of nest-box use in the central Alps of northern Italy between 2017 and 2025. Thirty-nine nest-boxes, located at elevations ranging from 2300 to 3010 m above sea level (asl), were placed in different environments that vary with elevation: from relatively tall alpine grassland, to sparse short-sward grassland, to nival habitats with exposed rocky areas. Average percentage snow cover was estimated (using remote sensing data) within a 300 m radius around each nest-box during June (peak of breeding activity), and was used to model nest-box use at different elevation.
We found that at relatively low elevation (< 2487 m a.s.l.), nest-box usage increased with snow cover, because more snow means more suitable foraging habitats (snow patches and their melting margins, and shorter grassland sward). However, nest-box use decreased with snow cover at higher elevation (> 2753 m a.s.l.) where, compared to lower elevations, the vegetation is sparser and shorter, and represents a very suitable foraging habitat for the species when not covered by snow. Finally, even if we do not have enough data to quantitively evaluate the effect, it seemed that at the highest elevations (> 2900 m a.s.l.) nest-boxes were used, although only thrice, only with high snow cover condition. Here, snowfinches probably rely on wind-blown arthropods deposited on snowfields, given the lack of alpine grassland.
Our results represent preliminary findings, but they confirm the importance of snow cover for the snowfinch, by providing a first insight into the elevation-dependent effect of snow on nest-box use by this high-elevation, cold-adapted species. These results may also help interpret some complex responses to climate change shown by high-elevation species. Nevertheless, many aspects need more investigation: we are confident that the snowfinch.eu collaborative initiative will shed light on them!
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