Must be fall!

That’s cool your caregiver wheeled you outside.

I think the cranes must have snuck out. Usually I see mass formations. This year I heard one small flock, somewhere in the distance.

Same with geese.

I have seen more cranes this year going south than any other. Same 5 large flocks two weeks ago. Did see a huge flock of Canadian geese last week.

I’ve been starting to notice big flocks of high flyers recently. We have a ton of Snows here but we don’t usually see the huge flocks of thousands of birds until late winter. Usually February and March after the general season is finished the birds move onto the fields turning them solid white. When a flock like that gets up it sounds like several 747’s powering up….they’re definitely noisy.

We have not seen the typical numbers of geese for this time of year in Edmonton, I think the majority of them are still up north, it is unseasonably warm for this time of year.

I spoke too soon, maybe. Last two days there have been a lot of geese and swans going over.

Maybe someone sent them a weather report.

2 inches of wet snow on the deck this morning , still coming down, but won't stick. Headed to the Lobo cabin later. Gonna be greasy on the track.

Forecast high tomorrow is 45*

In my backyard a few minutes ago they are starting to pile in!

Snows are different on many levels... there are virtually no snows nesting in AK (tiny population in Prudhoe Bay are the only known population.) The snows that flew over me left Russia, Wrangel Island specifically, and are headed down the Pacific Flyway to winter on our Pacific coast. We are in flyover country. We have Canada geese, mostly duskies, all over the place.

I recall reading in the book “Two in the Far North” by Margaret Murie who was the wife of Olaus Murie of the famous Murie brothers who were naturalists that spent countless hours studying, sketching, collecting samples and all the other stuff naturalists do and did back in the 19teens and on through the 1920’ & 30’s. One of the chapters described a goose banding “mission” they embarked upon paying a Indian friend to pole them up the Old Crow river deep in the north Easter interior. It was a arduous trip fraught with all kinds of discomforts like mosquitoes but it was also a success in many other ways. They found a lot of prehistoric artifacts like teeth from the giant beaver and quite a bit of mammoth bone and ivory. They did all that work but in the end they only banded several dozen, if I recall correctly they were only able to band somewhere less than a hundred and they weren’t terribly optimistic that they would get much information or returns from the banding project. In the end they received quite a few returned bands with the associated information that indicated the date and area killed. They received a few returns each year for several years and could see how many times the individual goose migrated. Where each goose was killed in relation to the Old Crow river was really interesting too. The distribution of that very small sample told scientists a lot back then and that little goose banding project opened the door for new research. I don’t have the book with me down here but I’ll be back up there in a week or two….it recall correctly they recovered geese from hunters in Texas to Alberta and Kansas…Saskatchewan and Idaho and several places in between. Those geese in one little section of the Old Crow river in NE Alaska/far NW Yukon went in “all directions”….

I do know that the snow geese we kill here are by and large Wrangel island origin. Most of the geese that show up around now are Canadian geese or a subspecies of Canadians with the snows, at least the giant flocks of snows coming later.

Just saw the first flock of cranes headed south. Figure they must have left Alaska what, two-three weeks ago?

Necroposting, just to say the cranes are headed back your direction. Heard and saw two flocks yesterday, heard what sounded like two bigass flocks today.

I always like seeing them migrate.

Just been seeing and hearing cranes in central TX headed north the last week or so. They will be in AK before I fly north for the year.

Took this picture in my backyard yesterday, February is not the typical time that Geese show up, about three weeks early this year.

Last year the cranes showed up to 2 feet of snow covering the ground. They circled and circled squawking. "What the hell" "What the hell"...

They are thick in SD right now. We're setting high temp records today.

Usually pass through SE Oregon, but not seen any yet. Typically swans ahead of the snows, but not seen those either.