Snow Goose Migration

While I love my home in the Adirondacks, there is one thing that I definitely miss about living in the Champlain Valley--the migration of Snow Geese. Each spring and fall thousands of Snow Geese stop in the corn fields adjacent to Lake Champlain to refuel for the rest of their journey. In the spring their final destination is the arctic tundra, a flight worth making to reproduce because there are few predators in far northern climates. In the fall their final destination is the southern United States and Mexico, where they winter in farm fields and grasslands. When I lived in the Champlain Valley the Snow Geese were the true sign that the seasons are about to change, migrating in the first days of spring and the last days of fall, timing their arrival to just avoid the snowfall. These birds take their time reaching their destination--unlike small songbirds that can fly hundreds if not thousands of miles in a few days these larger birds fly much shorter distances before needing to refuel. They stop in numerous fields on their way south, hoping to find fields such as the one I saw them in yesterday,which was a recently plowed cornfield full of broken corn cobs. They'll stay as long as they can to pack on weight for the next leg of their journey, and push on when the weather changes.

There are about 3000 geese in this shot.

What makes Snow Geese such an amazing sight to see is the sheer numbers in which they migrate in, covering the fields so well that from a distance they look like a blanket of snow themselves. Adult birds have strikingly beautiful white plumage, with black outer primary feathers that make them easy to distinguish from other waterfowl in the air. Young birds are less white, with dusky gray feathers throughout. Mixed in with these beautiful white birds are the less common "Blue Goose", which look like another species all together but are simply a bluish-gray color morph of  the same species. Adult blue morphs have a pure white head and neck, contrasting beautifully with the darker body, while the juveniles are entirely dark gray. In the flocks that I saw yesterday there was maybe one blue goose for every hundred white geese.

When the geese arrive in the Champlain Valley they move between the fields each day, staying mainly in the fields between Rouses Point and Chazy. When I lived on Conroy Farm in West Chazy, I anxiously awaited the day each year that the geese would land in the cornfield behind my house, so I could watch them from my upstairs window. One year I spotted a rare Greater White-Fronted Goose from my window, a real treat. So it was fairly ironic that when I went looking for the Snow Geese yesterday I happened to find them right on the Conroy Farm, and in much greater numbers than I was expecting this late in the season. Right across from Conroy Organics was a flock of about 5000 Snow Geese, and there were another 1000-2000 birds in adjacent fields as well. I watched them for over an hour, admiring their beauty, snapping photos, and looking for banded birds. An organization in Nunavut, way up in the Arctic Circle, has been banding the snow geese on their breeding grounds for years, and I have tried to do my part to report the bands I see when they pass through. The bands are placed on the neck so that they can be read easily from a distance, if you have good eyes for that sort of thing. Straining my eyes to read the bands yesterday brought back memories of a job I had this spring reading color bands on Red Knots, a small shorebird whose bands are about a tenth the size of the ones used on geese and much more challenging to read (picture below). I think that job actually did help my resighting skills, because I was able to read 4 distant band combinations yesterday just using my inexpensive spotting scope. On the Red Knot project we used top-of-the-line scopes that cost a few thousand dollars, but reading such small numbers was still very difficult. Today I reported the band numbers from the geese to the USGS bird banding lab and researchers at Laval University, who oversee the project. Immediately I found out that all 4 birds were females, and that two of them were just banded this year. The oldest bird that I reported was banded in 2007, and had been resighted three times since being banded, including one sighting in NY in the spring of 2009. My sighting was the first record of this bird for the past year, which makes my sighting crucial to the researcher's goals of determining survivorship.

A Red Knot with color bands--the three digit code is on the green band.

While watching the flocks of geese yesterday I was a little disheartened to hear the sound of gunshots just a few fields away, which scared about 1000 geese into the air to land in the field I was watching. While I appreciated being able to see and photograph the geese in flight, it saddened me to think about these beautiful birds being shot. I'm not opposed to all hunting, but don't understand why a hunter would choose to  hunt a snow goose when there is a greater need to control the population explosion of Canada Geese, which were also in fields nearby. Sadly it is a common sight to see a bird whose plumage is washed in blood due to a gunshot wound, and yesterday I did see one bird with a gunshot wound on its neck. I always appreciated that the Conroy Farm had "No hunting" signs posted to protect the geese, one of few fields where they aren't in danger from hunters.

Snow Geese up close, including white adults and grayer juveniles. Can you find the Blue goose in this photo?

When I lived on the farm the sounds of Snow Geese flying overhead would last a few weeks in the fall, and then the quiet of winter would set in. I miss the sound of those flocks now that I'm nestled in between mountains. But I'm glad I had the chance to see them at least once along their journey, and look forward to seeking them again in the spring.