Day 8, Snow Goose / Anser caerulescens

The 10 images posted tonight were all taken on the morning of 14 May 2018, Day 8 of our two-week holiday in Point Pelee (Ontario) and Tadoussac (Quebec). Thankfully, I have reached a few much larger birds, which were a pleasure to see and photograph after struggling to get any shots of the small birds that we had just been seeing. However, those small birds were a real treat, especially the beautiful Lapland Longspurs. Though we do get them in Alberta, I have never seen one here. Most likely, I will never see one again, hence the distant shots that I have uploaded. I still have to track more or less where we saw these particular Snow Geese. The photo of a mass of distant Snow Geese was taken about 50 minutes after the shot of the Great Blue Heron, so the last few photos I have just uploaded were taken in the early afternoon. We get Snow Geese in Alberta, but on the few occasions that I have seen them, they have been far, far away.

"Watching huge flocks of Snow Geese swirl down from the sky, amid a cacophony of honking, is a little like standing inside a snow globe. These loud, white-and-black geese can cover the ground in a snowy blanket as they eat their way across fallow cornfields or wetlands. Among them, you might see a dark form with a white head—a color variant called the “Blue Goose.” Snow Geese have skyrocketed in numbers and are now among the most abundant waterfowl on the continent.

The Snow Goose is a white-bodied goose with black wingtips that are barely visible on the ground but noticeable in flight. The pink bill has a dark line along it, often called a "grinning patch" or "black lips." You may also see dark morph Snow Geese, or "Blue Geese," with a white face, dark brown body, and white under the tail.

Snow Geese don’t like to travel without the company of another couple dozen geese and can form flocks of several hundred thousand. Family groups forage together on wintering grounds, digging up roots and tubers from muddy fields and marshes. In flight, they are steady on the wing with even wingbeats." From AllAboutBirds.

www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Snow_Goose/id