Our Snow Goose Adventure

We learned about the Lesser Snow Geese in Delta, UT from our PIAs (Partners in Adventure) so we decided we would all take a trip to Delta. We missed the Delta Snow Goose Festival that they have every year in Delta, but the wildlife biologist assured us that there would be around 10,000 birds still in Delta for us to see and photograph. The geese arrive in Delta around mid-February on their 3,000 mile migration from the Imperial Valley in California to their breeding grounds on the western Arctic coast. There are around 30,000 geese that stop to rest and feed before they continue on their journey.

We left around 8:00 am since a website we read said that they arrive at Gunnison Bend Reservoir in Delta around 10:30 a.m. We arrived a little before 10:00 a.m. and this is what we saw.

Now that did not look like 10,000 geese to me! We waited around for awhile watching and listening to the geese thinking something more was going to happen a hoping that this was not a bust like our "Bald Eagle Trip."  We talked to some other people and they said that we could drive around Delta and we would probably find the geese still feeding in the field. (They are on the water from about 10:30 am to about 4:30 pm when they go to the fields to feed.) We looked and we didn't find any geese, but we found a small farm and saw...

a llama,

some lambs, and some of the woolliest sheep I have ever seen... OK I admit I'm a city girl. :)

Well, with no luck seeing the Snow Geese in the field we returned to the reservoir and there were more birds, but they were just sitting around/standing around and sometimes flapping their wings.

What we really wanted was to see them flying around because we had heard so much about it.  A lady told us to be patient, they usually fly around about once every hour. We waited and it was more than worth it. As we were watching them on the water/ice on the right some of the geese started to lift up and then like a wave moving to the left they (almost) all lifted up and flew into the air. They flew around the reservoir for a few minutes and then landed. Here are a few of the pictures that Kim took. (Be sure to click on the images so you can see the complete picture.)

This is at the beginning of the "lift off."

This is only a few seconds later, but there are so many flying so close together I really don't know how they miss hitting one another.

You can see that some have not yet received the "lift off" message. Have you ever seen a cloud of birds. I will be posting some more pictures on flickr. This post is already long enough. Meanwhile you can watch a video on youtube from 2008 posted by the Salt Lake Tribune. You can see and hear these noisy birds. :)