Snow Geese Migration at Freezeout Lake, MT

This morning (Saturday, March 30nd) I got to tag along on some ornithology students' field trip to Freezeout Lake, which is a hotspot for migrating snow geese in Montana!  Earlier in the week, a friend told me they saw 90,000 geese (yes, 90,000!) while they were there (and got pooped on twice).  Many of the geese have moved on since then, but we still saw several thousand!

I got up at 5:45am, met the students and the T.A. (who's a friend of mine and the reason I got to join), and we drove about 2.5 hours to the lake.  It was a beautiful scenic drive and I didn't take any photos (sorry!), so you'll just have to imagine the turquoise sky before the sunrise, the snow-covered mountainside pine forests, and green rivers meandering through rust-red rock formations.  Other people in the car saw some elk, but I missed them.  We also saw some birds on the drive -- most notably, two rough-legged hawks flying right next to the road!

We saw our first huge flock of geese standing in an agricultural field, so we pulled over and watched as literally thousands of geese flew over us to the lake.  It was stunning!  Then we continued to the lake itself and watched the geese for a while.  We also saw tundra swans, red-winged blackbirds, western meadowlarks, a northern harrier, two ring-necked pheasants, various gulls, and miscellaneous ducks (mostly wigeons and mallards).  We also saw part of a dried-up dead fish, so I got to look at a fish spine.  A few of the snow geese we saw were the "blue morph," which is the same species but instead of being mostly white with some dark wing-patches, they're mostly dark with a white head!

Geese in the air, and that long white strip in the grass is also all geese!

Just a few of the geese on the ground

Just a few of the geese part 2

For the most part the geese were not actually making that much noise, but at one point a few thousand decided to start flying almost simultaneously, and they got much louder.  I took a short video:

We kept driving partway around the lake and stopped to look at some western meadowlarks and horned larks!  I had never seen horned larks before, so that was pretty exciting!  The meadowlarks on this trip were also my first meadowlarks of the season (they migrated south for the winter), so I was pleased about them as well.

Two male horned larks

After the larks was one of the biggest highlights of the day -- a gorgeous short-eared owl hunting in the fields next to the road!  We watched it hunt for quite a while.  I didn't get any still photos, but I did get a short video!  It's a little shaky at the start, but in the second half you can see the owl fairly well.

.We kept driving and saw a dead vole on the road.  Two of the people on the trip have been working with the university's museum (I cannot give more details about this because I don't know the details) and one of them is also studying rodents for their PhD thesis, so they decided to collect the vole as a specimen.   We needed a container, so I offered to make room in my tupperware with my sandwich for a piece of shortbread (not the vole), so that the ziploc bag formerly occupied by the shortbread could be used to carry the vole.

We stopped again to eat some snacks (sandwiches and donuts, not the vole) and saw more geese, miscellaneous ducks, and two American white pelicans!  The pelicans are in their breeding season right now, so they had what's called a nuptial tubercle on their bills (looks like a funny flat nubbin; the internet says it's a "fibrous plate").  No pictures from this spot, unfortunately.

After eating our snacks, we got back in the car to head home.  We saw more birds on the drive, including common mergansers, various hawks, and a bald eagle.  Most exciting from the drive home was a pair of sandhill cranes!  We drove past them at first, but turned around to watch them, and it was so worth it.  I'd seen sandhill cranes before, but they are always a delight, and this was the best view I've had of them in a while.

Making its way downtown, walking fast, faces pass, and its home-bound. *piano riff*

This pictures is quite a bit blurrier than the others, but I enjoy the position of its legs.

Also on the drive, we saw an American coot (kind of chicken-shaped, acts like a duck, isn't really either) and a turkey vulture!  I love turkey vultures and, like with the meadowlarks, hadn't seen any yet this year because they also migrated south and are just starting to come back!

All-in-all, a fantastic day!  At some point I can update this post with the full list of birds we saw, but one of the other people in the group was keeping track of sightings for the group as a whole and I don't have the list yet.  I hope you enjoy the pictures and videos!