Dead Carp
It's been a warm spring and we drove over to Freezeout Lake, partly just to get out and enjoy spring, but hopefully at a good time to see all the Snow Geese and Ross's Geese that stage there.
I also wanted to see what kind of round-trip mileage I would get with the truck. We can make it over and back easily, but not towing the Happier Camper, and unfortunately there's no place to charge at Freezeout.
At first we thought we had completely missed the big snow geese aggregation. We drove in on the west side and didn't see hardly any birds, although we did see bazillions of dead carp on the beach. Wow! I've never seen so many dead fish. No idea what killed them, but maybe lack of oxygen. There were four or five golden eagles hanging on the cliffs to the west, coming down to feed on the dead fish; also some seagulls doing the same. I figured the geese had already left for more northerly parts.
Then we went around to the main entrance and the more easterly lakes. There was still ice on some of the lakes, and some birds hanging out on the ice, maybe some seagulls and some geese.
Then we saw a huge raft of geese in the open water quite a ways away. They stretched about as far as I could see from left to right.
There were a few people sitting on lawn chairs with spotting scopes and cameras. Most of them had been there for a while and said the geese had already flown earlier. Some of them eventually got up and left. We watched for a while and were getting pretty bored; I was about ready to pack things up. But then all at once the whole raft rose up and took off. Wow! What a sight to see. We later learned on the Freezeout Lake Bird Count website that there were over 60,000 birds that day -- second highest for the season.
60,000 seems like a lot, but once upon a time, and maybe still in some places, there are hundreds of thousands in one place all at once. Boy would that be something to see!
After taking off, the geese flew around for a short bit and then all landed again. I guess it wasn't quite time to leave for points north yet.
We hung around a bit longer, then checked out the campground. Maybe next year or this fall we will go over again with the camper and spend the night.