Avalanche of Snow Geese!
Snow Goose (Anser caerulescens) - As @iamkamriell recently mentioned in her Instagram post, a wildlife photographer is either blessed with patience or blind luck. Our January 3-day drive from the top of the country (Bellingham WA) to the bottom of the country (San Diego, CA) suddenly offered us an overwhelming helping of the latter.
Just north of Sacramento, California is a long belt of farmland in Williams/Maxwell (mostly rice paddies) along the interstate freeway 5. Although we had driven this mostly-monotonous stretch many many times, this was the first time we had been through in January. My wife first spotted a “cloud” of birds in the sky, then a dusting of white birds in the fields beside us, and quickly flipped a U-turn (uh, legally by going to the next offramp and returning!) so that I could get out on the side of the freeway (somewhat illegally) to take some photos. Some active hunters nearby soon caused an “avalanche of snow geese” (as I called it) and tens of thousands of them lifted into the air, all honking, and flew right overhead and back around before settling down the road a bit… and as they all flew over, the sound of their flapping and calling was so loud, it drowned out the semi-truck noise on the freeway right behind me! We now have another unforgettable wildlife experience indelibly etched in our heads!
Snow geese migrate from the arctic tundra down into the United States and back. 100 years ago there were not many, but recently, mostly due to lots of US forests cut to make way for grazing and farming, which offer the geese plentiful food, they have exploded in numbers, and even recent attempts at increasing the hunting allowances has not reduced the growth rate. The down-side is that these birds are competing with other arctic birds in the northern nesting areas. And a goose-hunter I met there also pointed out that they are eating up all the vegetarians’ food, so he’s helping out a bit :-)