Hi all, I went to Muckland hoping to see the snow geese again as I am hoping to replace some shots with new material to my last year's documentary, which I did for a class.
I went directly to Muckland! Not a goose - neither Snow nor Canada, in fact no birds period! I did find lots of cars parked, I am sure by now you guessed it, yes hunters! I also saw a truck full of snow geese, first I thought they were real dead geese, but they looked like decoys through binocs. But I could see lots of snow geese in the sky and they were heading in all directions. Some seemed like going towards Carncross. So I headed there, when I was on the way, I saw them head northeast of MAC. So I went in that directions and back roads no luck. Everywhere I found they were still going ahead of me and straight across the field through which I could not drive :-( So I came back to Cayuga Lake State park, where there were no snow geese when I had previously passed the location a couple of hours earlier, now was filled with may be 10000 + snow geese, many were still landing from south west directions, but they were far out on the lake as seen in Dave Nicosia's video. So I took rounds of some of the back roads with no luck. When I was at the junction of 414 and county road 118, thousands of snow geese were flying parallel to 118. So I took that road to see if I can locate them. I drove all the way to Rt 96, which was about 5 miles, but the snow geese continued. May be they went to Seneca Lake or fields along 14. So disappointed I headed back to the lake to see if the resting snow geese would fly out somewhere as I was looking for some flight scenes. As I came to intersection of 89. I saw them going behind the Lakeside Trading Gas station and landing. So after going all around they could be found so close to the state park. I took quite a few scenes of them coming in and landing. Then something disturbed them and all of them took off, but they seem to have landed somewhere nearby as I could hear them. So I decided to check the golf course. Sure enough they were there. As they landed the Canada geese moved out of their way, they continued to chase the Canada geese further and further. One more commotion again, all took off and circled and again settled back. They were starting to feed, when something else or another human being disturbed them. They all took off and went behind the gas station. Now they seemed so hungry that they decided to ignore passing cars and people. I had parked at the side and was sitting on the road and taking the videos, they were just some 20 meters away from me. My feather jacket which looks like a dead tree did not seem to have bothered them, they were merrily feeding and doing what they wanted. Often one family would not let another family to feed in their patch and were quite nasty at times, pecked at each other or with beak they poked the backs of the intruders. On other occasions, many birds walked past them, there was no interaction. It does seem that the passerby has some kind of signal that tells the feeding family, ok you are boss, we are just passing to next patch and they are allowed to go. So after sometime, I wanted to go to the front of the car and take some videos. But as I passed the back driver side tire, I found it totally flat! I had heard some sound at one point when I was driving, I thought it was something to do with the road and in excitement of seeing snow geese, I totally forgot that my car is doing something funny. There was a driveway right across where I had parked the car and some members of the house had just pulled in. So I decided to check with them for the nearest gas station where I can get the tire fixed. To cut the long story short, the house owner fixed the tire and even repaired it in about twenty minutes, while I was chatting with wife and mother -in-law in their living room! His wife happens to know one of Gladys's sisters! Amazing! So there are still very nice people out there! I looked at the video cuts of more than one hour and I think I have some very nice shots of flights and some feeding behaviors! It is going to take days to edit them! I will post a clip to you tube in next few days. Cheers Meena Meena Haribal Ithaca NY 14850 http://haribal.org/ http://meenaharibal.blogspot.com/ -- Cayugabirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsWELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsRULES http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/Cayugabirds 3) http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/CAYU.html Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
