How we DID that...
Snow Goose Photography 
​at Middle Creek

• HOME
• The Atlantic Wild Horse Trail
• Backyard Poultry
• Backyard Horses
• Bird Photography
• Drawing and Painting
• ​Complicated childbirth
• Hatching baby emus
• Training animals
• A woman, a horse, and a disease
• Photographing wild places
• Other quirky and unusual things

The snow goose migration at Middle Creek WMA in early spring is spellbinding.  They float upon the lake for an hour, two hours, calling to each other in a ceaseless burble. Then suddenly, the timbre of their voices shifts, their excitement palpable. A dense mass of birds peels away from the lake and rises as a wall that grows taller by the second until it extends skyward.  The chorus of impassioned voices rises in pitch and volume until it becomes a waterfall of sound.  There is a roar as 200,000 wings beat in unison. Pulsing waves of geese coalesce into a collective. The ethereal, amorphous mass of geese contracts and expands, wing to wing, seemingly of one mind. The mass stretches into a single layer of white geese which course thinly across the cerulean sky.  Backlit, the rising sun glows though translucent wings. Synchronized wingbeats scatter light in brilliant flashes, like heat lightning in a roiling storm cloud.   Then the cloud  circles back on itself,  rotating like a tornado of geese.  Singularly and in pairs, geese drift softly back to the lake, like a gentle fall of snow.