[mou] Traverse County geese

[Karl Bardon]

The goose and swan migration in Traverse County the
last few days was spectacular. I spent all day on
Sunday and part of the day on Monday counting birds in
flooded fields throughout the county, with totals as
follows:

Tundra Swan: 9,655
Greater White-fronted Goose: 18,645
Snow Goose: 15,700
Ross’s Goose: 638
Cackling Goose: 2,317

With Tuesday's shift to south winds, there was a mass
exodus of geese from this area during the early
morning: while standing at Mud Lake, I counted over
46,000 geese flying overhead, but because many of the
flocks were distant, and because the flocks were often
so large, I had to count many flocks by hundreds, and
left some 20,300 geese unidentified. Nevertheless,
during this flight I was able to identify 18,200
Greater White-fronted Geese, 5,600 Snow Geese, 2,100
Canada Geese, 300 Cackling Geese, and 18 Ross’s Geese.
Most of the flooded fields that held geese on Sunday
and Monday were nearly empty of birds by Tuesday.

The highlight of these three days was a single
immature blue morph type Ross’s Goose seen with a
flock of 88 Ross’s Geese (interestingly, this flock
contained only 40 Snow Geese).

Karl Bardon


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com