A Whole Lot of Empty

Sometimes the birding urge just overtakes you. Completely ignoring a mountain of work at home, my husband and I decided to spend a sunny November Sunday tooling around the prairie countryside looking for snow geese.

When we left at 8:30 am, it was a brisk 2C, and the sun was pouring through the windows. To the west, the Rocky Mountains were covered in fresh snow, but we were heading for the dry southeast.

Most people look at the prairies and see a whole lot of empty. Not a bird watcher though. True, the birds can sometimes be hard to find, but that just increases the challenge, and isn’t that what birding is all about? Birding in the prairies is just like birding in the desert – look for water and/or trees. On this crisp late fall day, the ponds and prairie potholes were free of ice, and most of them held a few puddle ducks.

Some ponds though, had more than a few.

This little pond was loaded, and I do mean loaded, with birds. Tundra swans, Canada geese, mallards, northern pintails, common mergansers and American wigeons were the ones I could pick out from the crowd. And the Canada geese were just pouring in, wave after wave of them. I expected each new flock to land on top of the birds already there, but somehow they all made room for each other.

Our goal for the day was a large prairie reservoir called Keho Lake. It’s about 2 miles long and 1.5 miles wide, situated in the arid prairies, and I thought it should be a magnet for snow geese. This was our first trip to the reservoir, and I can’t wait to return in the spring. This oasis in the prairies must be bird central!

While the lake seemed to be lacking the snow geese we came to see, the weather and the setting were so perfect we stopped and had a picnic beside the water. In November.

You can drive all the way around this big lake, and when we reached the other side, we discovered where the birds were. A few hundred tundra swans, Canada geese, western grebes, horned grebes, American coots, buffleheads, common golden-eyes, hooded mergansers and yes, snow geese out in the middle.

I was busy snapping photos of this tundra swan family of three juveniles and two adults, and didn’t realize that I had also caught the snow geese in the background.

Just as we walked up the edge of the lake the snow geese took flight. Hundreds if not thousands of them rose at once. I was so completely mesmerized by this fantastic spectacle I never lowered the binos long enough to take a photo. It’s impossible to know how many there were, but I would estimate somewhere around 2000 birds, which is a small flock for this time of year.

Having reached our goal of seeing snow geese this fall, we made our way back home. A rough-legged hawk, mourning doves, black-billed magpies, ravens, pine siskins and gray partridge rounded off the trip nicely. But there was one more surprise waiting for us.

After we had been home about 10 minutes, I stuck my head around the corner into the living room. And saw this.

A female house sparrow, casually perched on the door of our entertainment center. Inside the house. Talk about a surreal moment – I would have given a great deal to have seen the look on my face just then.

My husband was sitting in the room reading the newspaper. I said “didn’t you see that bird”? He immediately looked at the tree outside the window. I said, “no, the bird by the TV”. I guess his expression was similar to mine, come to think of it.

Three attempts with a towel to catch her, and the little lady was once again outside with her flock. She was a well mannered guest though, and didn’t even let fly with any droppings when I attempted to catch her.

We can only surmise she was in our cat run the same time as our cat, who has free access to the run so he can come and go when he wants. He’s a terrible hunter though, and keeps bringing live, unhurt mice into the house and dropping them on the floor. Which leaves me scrambling around to catch the little things to put them back outside.

The cat received a talking to on this day, and was told not to bring friends in the house to play with when we’re not home. I’m pretty sure he almost opened his eyes during the talk.

All in all, it was certainly a memorable day of birding. Maybe next time we go looking for snow geese, we’ll take the cat with us.