The Great Waterfowl Migration

     From a distance, they look like snow fell on one field.  When they all take flight, amid wing flapping and shrill honking, at once in their many thousands, the background of trees or buildings is completely blocked from view.  And when they settle onto the same field, or another one, they look like a large, swirling blizzard of giant snow flakes falling onto one spot.  They are snow geese wintering in the Mid-Atlantic States, as elsewhere in the United States. 
     Snow geese and tundra swans create the most spectacular natural shows we could hope to see in the Middle Atlantic States during winter and early spring.  Both species rest, feed and travel in constantly noisy flocks, the swans in their scores and the snow geese in their thousands.
     Snow geese and tundra swans are related and have much in common.  Both species of these large, web-footed birds are mostly white, though snow geese have black wing tips and a race of them are gray with white necks and heads.  Geese and swans both raise young on the Arctic tundra, but winter in various places of big water in the Lower 48, including along the eastern seaboard of the United States.  Both kinds have adapted to resting on larger bodies of water, including built impoundments, but feeding on waste corn kernels and the green shoots of winter rye in human-made fields when wintering in and migrating through the states.  And their great hordes are most dramatic when they are staging to migrate north to their tundra nesting territories.
     But snow geese and tundra swans have distinctive characteristics as well, traits we use to identify each species.  The stately swans have white plumages all over, and longer necks than do the geese.  The swans take off from water or land in family groups or in gatherings of a few score, more or less, flock after flock after flock over a period of time.  Swans utter loud, reedy calls that sound like "woo-hoo", "woo-hoo-hoo".  But the geese all take flight at once in their uproarious thousands, obliterating the background and uttering high-pitched, ear-splitting honking.  Snow geese always feed, rest and fly in one big, overwhelming mass.  There is safety in numbers.  
     From about mid-February to the second week in March, depending on the weather, northbound snow geese and tundra swans have gathered the last several years on different parts of the large, human-made impoundment at Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania where I live.  There they rest away from each other, because they don't seem to mix well, and twice daily fly out to harvested corn fields and green rye fields, which are in Lebanon County north of Middle Creek. 
     I think as many people as waterfowl come to Middle Creek to see that great show of geese and majestic swans during the few weeks in early spring when those birds are there.  After staging at Middle Creek, and other places nearby, the snow geese and tundra swans  continue their migration north to the Great lakes and the St. Lawrence River, where they stop again and wait for spring to catch up to their restless urges to migrate and reproduce.  Both species skip through Canada in that way, bit by bit, as the vernal season marches north, until they reach the tundra around the middle of May, already paired and ready to lay eggs and hatch young.  
     The goslings and cygnets hatch around the end of June.  They have until the beginning of October to grow up and be hardened for the flight south to the Atlantic Seaboard from New Jersey south to the Chesapeake Bay and the Outer Banks of North Carolina.  But because there are 24 hours of daylight each day during summer in the Arctic and plenty of plant and invertebrate foods, the young grow quickly.  Unlike their northbound migration of short flights and long rests, the southbound push of snow geese and tundra swans is made in one non-stop flight because there is nothing to stop them.  They winter along the East Coast, as well as other places in the Lower 48, feed on field vegetation and stage for the flight north early the next spring.  And so the cycle goes for both species, year after year.    
     Try to experience the great waterfowl migration this early spring, or a succeeding one.  It is the most spectacular natural show we can hope to see here in the Middle Atlantic States.