Goosed!

The goal of our recent trip to Nebraska was to view migrating sandhill cranes. We were thrilled to see and hear thousands of the large birds but we were also amazed by the sighting of what was  almost certainly more than a million geese. 

We started seeing large numbers of geese overhead almost as soon as the interstate began following the Platte River in Nebraska. The streams looked like undulating lines of skywriting overhead that went on for mile after mile after mile. At first we assumed the birds were Canada Geese but a closer look showed that they were primarily Snow Geese. Over the course of the next five days we saw some Canadas and a few White Fronts but the overwhelming majority of birds were the white and black Snow Geese.

 The birds tended to travel or feed in the corn fields with the sandhill cranes during the day and then bunk in to small lakes or on the sand bars in the Platte River during the nighttime hours.

 There were times when the sky was totally black with snow geese. The photo above looks like an insect hatch. It is pretty amazing to think that each one of those specks is a 5-6 pound bird!

The two color variations of snow geese can be seen in this last photo.