Showy Snowy Geese
We have the great good fortune to live near Anahuac, a national wildlife refuge. This is part of the Mississippi flyway for migrating birds. There are a lot of waterbirds here and duck hunting is a treasured sport.
One day last week, we decided to spend a day at the refuge. The sun was shining, there was a light breeze–very important–as that meant no mosquitoes, the temperature was in the mid sixties–too cold to stand but warm enough if you kept moving–and the birds were there.
There weren’t a lot of people–maybe about a half dozen or so; one man from Kingwood was sure he was photographing really rare birds–coots and egrets and rather scowled at me when I asked what he was seeing.
Snow geese occupied a huge bit of the larger lake areas; but there were plenty of smaller lakes with coots, egrets, shovelers, anhinga, and so forth. I’ve got a short movie on my smugmug account so you can hear the sounds that day. I must have been totally captivated by the pelican we found near one of the weirs as I have lots of photos in all sorts of positions including flying–they look so awkward with that huge beak sticking out.
The first time I saw snow geese was while driving between El Campo and Bay City–I saw fields of white–as far as I could see—I thought it was odd that no-one had marked upon the snowfall–until I got close enough to see that the ‘snow’ was geese. Embarrassing==but not as bad as the ‘roses’ I saw in Georgia that was actually cotton!
Sylvia Weir Art 