October 4, 2016
Pacific Northwest
On my way down to the city for a family event, rather than take the direct route I chose to meander across Fir Island in the Skagit Flats in hope of seeing migrating waterfowl. I’d seen a report at eBird of Snow Geese a couple of days earlier.
The Snow Geese who winter on the Skagit River delta of Washington state fly 3000 miles here from Wrangel Island off northern Siberia. By midwinter there will be 55,000 Snow Geese foraging in spent agricultural fields and wetlands. Their large busy and noisy flocks are really spectacular to see.
I caught a glimpse of white shapes in a distant field as we crossed the bridge from Fidalgo Island onto the Flats. Geese? Nope. That’s a marshmallow farm in the picture above. Actually, the white plastic-wrapped bales are animal feed.
It was a very dark gray overcast day, with poor visibility. I squinted at bright white shapes in the distance beyond the corn field. Geese?
I figured it wouldn’t be a wasted trip since I wanted to stop at a Fir Island farmstand about to close down for the season, for some supplies. And that’s when I heard a mass of honking overhead. Looked up — yep, finally Snow Geese! Heading south. Some high some low.
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Farmers and residents in the Flats really dislike it when rubber-necking tourists pull over by the side of the road to watch the White Wings Winter spectacle, creating a traffic hazard. So we headed for a parking area by the 15’ dike that keeps the waters of Skagit Bay from flooding the flat delta fields. It was very windy. There were a couple of birders there already, with binoculars. They were keenly watching toward the north by the time I climbed up onto the dike, and I could see a huge mass of white wings descending, off in the distance. I couldn’t quite make out what they were, a couple of miles away, using my 300mm zoom lens, but they definitely were NOT marshmallows or berry covering. White wings — cool! The couple standing there said they’d been watching flocks coming in for the past hour, one after the next. Wave after wave of swans! Wow. There had been no reports of swans at eBird and October is early for them. I was pretty thrilled, as you can imagine. I snapped several photos of this flock circling and descending onto the field.
Getting back in the car, I asked Mr O if he’d seen them. “Oh you mean those white dots?” Well, ok, it was getting late in the afternoon on an overcast day with spitting rain, and the birds were a longs ways off. I planned to check out my photos later to determine whether they were Trumpeter or Tundra swans before reporting them to eBird.
Two days later when I returned home I uploaded my pics and found to my disappointment they were NOT swans at all. Wha? Did I mishear the birders on the dike? Did they not know the difference between swans and geese, or were they toying with me? Did I want to hear swans so badly I heard something they didn’t say? Don’t know. I should probably carry some good binoculars as well as a camera. There’s a limit to what a zoom lens can resolve.
Nevertheless, I did see an early arrival of Snow Geese, which was magnificent!
We drove around to a spot where the road was a little closer to one end of the flock and I snapped some photos there too. I did see long curved necks at the time, but geese have those too, if not as long as swans’.
You’ll note the darker geese in front of the Snow Geese about the same size — those are Cackling Geese, birds different enough from Canada Geese to have been named a separate species recently. They are smaller than Canadas, with shorter bills (www.allaboutbirds.org/...). Summering in northernmost Alaska and Canada, these Cackling Geese must have joined the larger flock of Snow Geese somewhere along the way.
These are the first Cackling Geese I've seen, so I’m happy about that :)
I was wrong about the swans, but I will readily admit that. Science is a reality-based endeavor. It’s critically important to have accurate information to be able to draw conclusions and make predictions. If I’d walked away from the birders with just their say so, and no data from my own camera, I’d be doing this community a disservice.
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Raining steadily in the Pacific Northwest today. The fall rains have definitely arrived.
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Time for you to share what you’re seeing in your natural neighborhood . . .
Have you ever misidentified wildlife and realized it later?
Anything new in your area these days? Migrations, leaf color change?
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