Month: March 2022

everywhere a goose.

We have been visiting the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge for several years, but I was surprised by the number of geese we saw feeding on the refuge on this visit.  We may have seen more geese in previous years, but they have usually been in the pond, not feeding on the refuge.  This time, just the opposite was true. I suspect that’s because the farmers’ fields have been rototilled in preparation for Spring planting, and the geese are forced to feed on refuge grasses before heading north.

We were greeted by flocks of Snow Geese

and Greater White-Fronted Geese

at the beginning of the auto tour, and they were far from alone as geese could be found throughout the refuge.

I generally dislike photos where parts of the main subject are cut off, but with so many geese it was hard to find a lone goose

or a pair close enough together to capture in a single shot.

If we lived in the Willows area we would probably take the geese for granted, but seeing so many Snow and Greater White-Fronted geese was quite a treat for us considering that they are a rare sighting around Puget Sound unless you are willing to drive north to Everett.  

We finally managed to get down to the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge, and the weather was nearly ideal.  The trip started auspiciously with Leslie capturing this shot of a Wilson’s Snipe before we even entered the driving tour.   

I don’t see enough Wilson’s Snipes to say they are a favorite, but I spent nearly five years looking for one to photograph before finally finding one.  I have seen them more frequently once I actually found one, but we rarely see them.  

So it was totally unexpected when she got a shot of another snipe a little later.  Who says lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place?

I really thought we had hit a bonanza when Leslie said she had gotten a shot of a small flock of them.

I only got a glance at the flock because I was concentrating on locating a woodpecker in the other direction. However, I certainly thought it had been a small flock of Wilson’s Snipe after I took this shot a few minutes later in the exact same spot,  because this definitely a Snipe.

It’s only when I was home looking at the pictures on screen of the birds lifting off that they looked like Dowitchers, not Wilson’s Snipe.

Apparently we’re not the only ones who were confused by the two because the Cornell site shows a closeup of the two together and points out some of the differences — and they are fairly subtle differences.

Even without the Dowitchers that’s the most Wilson Snipes we’ve ever seen in a single day.