- Nunavut; Casual. A specimen was taken in August at Melville Island and well-described by Swainson and Richards (1831). Smith (1973) identified one shot by an Inuvialuit hunter on 26 June 1971 at Ulukhaktok (then Holman) and was told that they were rare in the area, but occurred almost every year. Manning et al. (1956) reported that Inuvialuit on Banks Island sometimes saw very small “sea ptarmigan” at the floe edge in late winter and spring, which could be this species. The closest colonies are located on the west coast of Greenland and at Home Bay on Baffin Island in Nunavut (Montevecchi et al. 2002), but there is a specimen from as far west as Point Barrow, Alaska (Bailey 1948) so periodic strays eastwards into NWT waters are likely. (NWT Bird Checklist Project).References.Bailey A.M.1948. Birds of Arctic Alaska. Colorado Museum of Natural History Population Service 8. 1-317., Manning, T. H., E. O. Höhn, and A. H. Macpherson. 1956. The birds of Banks Island. Natl. Mus. Canada Bull. 143., Montevecchi, William A. and Iain J. Stenhouse. (2002). Dovekie (Alle alle), The Birds of North America (P. G. Rodewald, Ed.). Ithaca: Cornell Lab of Ornithology; Retrieved from the Birds of North America: https://birdsna.org/Species-Account/bna/species/doveki Smith, T.G. 1973. The Birds of the Holman Region, Victoria Island. Canadian Field-Naturalist 87:35-42.Swainson W. and J. Richards. 1831. Fauna Boreali-Americana; or the Zoology of the Northern Part of British North America. Part II: The Birds. University of Pittsburgh. 523 pp.