So Many Wings

Well, it looked like it was going to be another one of those days. We've had so many like this lately. Snowy, cold. But I wanted to find some birds and there were plenty at Weed Lake. Kind of concentrating on what little open water there was. But not enough, so I kept looking. Down to the Bow River. Down by the weir there's usually quite a few birds. Today, not as many. Mostly swans and ducks. But there was one surprise. A single cormorant. Well, this poor guy must be freezing. But none of that was very satisfying, so I kept going south and east. At least hoping to get out of the snowy country. Kind of did, down here at McGregor Lake. But there was a bigger surprise here. Snow geese. Thousands and thousands of snow geese. I was both surprised and not surprised to find them here. The lake was still pretty frozen over, though there was quite a bit of open water as well. But in these numbers, man, that was crazy. There were plenty of pintails and witchens as well. I came across them as I went around the lake to see if I could find a better angle. Man, that blue mist that's everywhere. But, yeah, better angle. Lots of geese. It's really hard to convey the size of this flock in one kind of picture. This is only about a quarter of it, maybe less. But the light was absolutely terrible. So I kept on going south, hoping to find some geese on Travers Reservoir. No, I didn't. But it was nice to see this country again. When I was last here in January, it looked exactly the same. Today, though, it was colder. There were no birds on Travers Reservoir. And very few over on nearby Williams Lake. Found this kill deer on the way. And pretty quick started running into the birds from McGregor Lake. These are pintails and witchens. And, of course, these guys are snow geese. Oh, that light was so much better. A lot of that blue haze was gone and it looked like some snow had melted too so the geese weren't blending into the background like before. Now I could better see the amazing number of birds there were. I don't know. Ten thousand? Fifty thousand? I don't know. So many wings. So many voices. There were several flocks that extended up and down the lake. All of them just jammed with birds. A lot of them were in the air heading out for their evening feed. A couple of thousand of them were in a field quite close to the lake. But I'm sure there were many, many other fields beyond my line of sight that were absolutely solid with them. You know, I gotta admit that beyond the moisture content, which we always need, I've been getting pretty tired of this weather. But for a day that started out like so many others, it ended spectacularly.