Geese Flying North

In Nebraska, one sure herald of Spring is the arrival of hordes of migrating geese. The geese have been showing up in the last week or so, and they are usually around for a month or so as they spread out over the fields and try to fatten up before heading on north. The Sandhill Cranes don't come by where we live, but we occasionally drive west about an hour in order to observe them in the Platte River Valley. I thought you all might enjoy seeing a few geese pictures anyway. The geese are mostly snow geese (I think) although I'm pretty sure I saw some Canada geese too. We've also seen some ducks mixed into the group as well.

These geese were in the field next to our house. We tried creeping through our windbreak to get some pictures, but they're pretty sharp eyed and the whole group took off before we got to where I could get pictures on the ground. As soon as they took off, I ran to the edge (nothing to lose now) and got this and several other shots as they made their departure.

Today as Jenny and I were on our way home from the folks, we stopped when we say a bunch of geese flying overhead. When we stopped, we saw strings of geese as far as we could see in both directions, migrating overhead. We watched and I took the following pictures.

After about twenty or thirty minutes of this, we got back in the car and continued on, but we could still see geese as far as we could look in both directions. I counted a small group in one of my pictures, and based off of that count I estimate we saw around 10,000 geese fly overhead (the group was of course larger than that, they started before we got there and continued after we were gone). Iit's always kind of amazing to see that many geese fly overhead and once again it made me realize the beauty and wonder of God's creation. Well, that's it for my "goose" post, maybe one of these days I'll be posting about a new baby.....

~GB