Friday, April 10, 2009

Apr 8 - Geese (98/365)

Wow, guess it has been a week for birds! We were standing outside visiting when all of a sudden the sky erupted in noisy chatter!!

We looked up and for miles we saw what seemed like strings across the sky! I quickly realized it was what looked to be thousands of geese migrating north!! It was an astounding sight!

They were very high in the sky and what you see here is nothing to what filled our view for miles around and could see them far to the south, east and west of us. The 'strings' went on and on for several minutes! The unbelievably loud cacophony of the birds filled the air.

These birds must have set stopping places, like favorite resting spots, on their path north because we see a lot of them sitting on the ice of ponds and lakes around here; not on the water, but on the ice as many of the bodies of water here are still frozen!

I realize I left the roof of the neighboring house in the bottom of the photo, I felt it helped to ground the photo a little and make it less of a large blue rectangle ;) I didn't dare run back in the house for the zoom lens to get more of a close up of the birds. Besides, it was the amazing number of birds in the sky that inspired today's blog post.

Note: I did know a group of geese was a gaggle, but I did not know if they were flying it was called a skein! Thanks Nicky! :)

I shared this photo with a very bird savvy co-worker and he says they are likely snow geese. I am going to go looking for close ups this weekend!

3 comments:

Nicky Heppenstall said...

Collective noun for flying geese is a skein of geese; and for walking geese - a gaggle of geese.

The thumbnail had me puzzled - a blue square! LOL! Great shot!

Andrea said...

Very interesting image!

Anonymous said...

The first thing I think is ...Did you cover your head with an umbrella or put your jacket hood up? Looks like a good chance of getting pooped on to me LOL :o) There is a local pasture that geese land in every spring. It's funny to see geese and not the usual cows. It's hard to get the huge sky in a photograph, isn't it? We had a beautiful sunset with loads of clouds. I posted a shot on my blog but it just didn't deliver what I saw, ya' know?