SquawCreek NWR

Wanna know what 250,000 snow geese look like? How about 266 bald eagles? A couple-dozen swans? Or how about all of the above? Those were Friday's Numbers!

It was a a little bit cold for me, but I think that the freezing and defrosting sensations in your fingers and toes are a small sacrifice for the opportunity to 'chill out' with so many Geese!

Snow gees, Canadas and even a few small Ross' Geese coated much of the Pelican pool the other day, when numbers were not nearly as high!

The daytime high is to be only 21 degrees and the winds are rushing from the north! Ive already circled the refuge once; Lots of swans and eagles, as many snow geese as Ive ever seen at once and one mob of mallards. I found the bubbling effect of handfuls of squirming, frozen tadpols to be interesting! The desperate things beat at the wrong side of the ice- What were they doing? The refuge is still fairly icy from last weekend's snow and I dont know as though parking on the side of the loose gravel road would be the brightest thing to do!

The air isnt too bad without the wind, but a gust that rocks the truck is able to cut through to your bones! My toes are numb and my fingers are screamin' but this is so cool!

The noise of the birds is met only by that which is made when a strong gust howls through the thin row of bald trees that border the water, except when the Snow geese are spooked. The nearest birds waddle down the road in front of me- they are a hundred feet away and still goin' at it.

A small group of them sit on and float around a sheet of ice not too much further from me than the couple that flee by foot. They don't seem to be doing anything in particular- not eating, sleeping, cleaning or anything else that you might find them doing; They are just sitting and floating. Waiting, I guess- maybe for the wind to die or the cold to go away?

A few dark ones float on their legs and kick the water until the perfect spot is achieved. There is a small, white goose standing on the iceberg who certainly doesn't belong with all of mottled, marbled friends. This one is tiny compared to the average snow goose. A Ross'?

They explode- burst with the millions behind them up and off of the water and into the air- A young, dark eagle isnt too far off the ground to the right of all the hunted.

A large pickup rolled to a stop on the other side of the road. The window was down and I approached it's driver. A mound city couple- enjoying the nice weather? Yes, there were two people, though whomever occupied the passenger seat was no more than a round pile of blankets with a thin strip of skin and glasses. Her muffled voice described the group of 1.3million snow geese that visited their refuge this past March. The older, male driver went on to describe a Bobcat they'd seen last month. "'Had two kittens with r', and they just sat there by the side a'th road until we's finished lookin' at 'em!" He pointed me to the far eastern side of the wetland area. The woman interrupted his story with a bit of sympathy for a near goose that appeared to have a broken wind held above his head. "...Poor thing; That kinda thing just happens too often."

Another eagle swooped the Goose-island and a Camera-phone popped out of the blankets. They wished me well and warned me not to let myself get too cold-

The geese flushed into a HUGE FLOATING MASS that seemed to float above the remaining sitting birds. The mass rose to about thirty feet and began to break into many stringy groups. Each bird in the top half of the mass found its place in a string of geese that continued to into the air; The stings morphed into 'V's' and the V's separated from each other. The tangle of wings that had emerged from mess of them was made into about two dozen groups of birds following each other's butts in all sorts of directions. It seemed, for a moment, that the one silly eagle had scared almost a quarter of the birds off into the sky.

A good gust sent the floating birds and ice across the surface of the water. The result was a whole lot of birds scrambling to escape a wind-driven ice-jam in the very center of the 'Pelican Pool". Wings, feet and flung water were blown into a chaotic splash of adrenaline for many of the brids that came to return from the shy mass with such bad timing.The eagle disappeared and it took the last 1/4 of the panic-struck birds, which still circled in the thick mass only a few seconds to return to open water.

I watched a large blue-phase attempt an ice landing (and awkwardly avoid the splits or an icy face plant.) He fell dumbfounded into a few of his swimming companions. I had to take a break to sit on my own frozen fingers before I did anything else. Even the sight of the shocked bird hitting that icy water was enough to make me shiver. I have to wonder how they experience the temperature of their environment- Im sure that extended contact with that same water would send me into much pain!

It was a long, loud series of gunshots from the other side of the road that was the 'sugar-on-top' for the cold waterfowl's relaxing day on the refuge. They roared out of the water for the last time during my visit and those long-lost, high-altitude guys that fled from the top of the mass that the eagle spooked dwindled back to the mob.