Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge, Texas
We skipped the first snowstorm here in Iowa and spent instead a few more days in northern Texas. Our campsite was in Eisenhower State Park at Lake Texoma but the real destination of this trip was just half an hour away, the Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge. It was two days of intensive bird watching and photography. The highlight at this time of the season is a large number of Snow and Ross’s Geese that come down from the arctic regions and spent the winter in the wetlands of Hagerman refuge.
Snow and Ross’s Geese, Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge, Texas
The Friends of Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge have an excellent website and they perform a weekly bird census, that is mainly done for research but helps to prepare for such a trip as ours and gives you an idea what to look for. https://friendsofhagerman.com/
I like to share a few photos from Tuesday last week and the bird census for that day shows an estimate of 6000 geese that were present, Beside that, over 80 species of birds were counted by the volunteers. We have of course not seen all of them but still enough to make it two memorable days.
Snow Geese, Blue morph with a white in the background
Maybe something had spooked the whole flock of geese and suddenly they were all up in the air
The photography can be overwhelming at times. What tells the story better, the flock of geese as a whole or the shot of some individuals? It is not always easy to separate the birds from each other in the viewfinder and getting an impression about the large number of birds seems to be important as well.
The geese feed on fresh wheat in the refuge, planted by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service