Snow Geese Explosion Graylodge WA

DsrtVW

I knew there were Snow geese on the refuge, but as I turned the corner on the auto tour they covered the whole pond in front of me. Sun was just coming up but there was not much light with the clouds. I had removed my teleconverter so I could get down to f2 on the 200mm and get more in the frame, but by the time they started to go off I did not think to get the ISO higher so it was at 200 and getting a shutter of 1/160 or 1/125 so I unfortunately got some blur. I also forgot that I own a D7000 and it has video or I could have gone that route.

But here was the start of the closest group



Swung over to get a larger group



They just kept going with more filling the air the noise was incredible.



I switched to a wide angle to get a bigger picture of the sky



Here is a link to some video I did get later of a take off caused by some other photogs. I knew where they were going so I stake out a spot and waited. A much smaller flock but gives you some idea. Just multiply the noise by 100 for the earlier frames in the thread.



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Ric Grupe

Very cool, Chris!

These scenes with huge flocks are really tough to record with a still camera...the video gives the needed motion to appreciate what's happening.

kithylin

I kinda like some of em with a little blur in it like you shot it, shows movement and motion of the whole flock a little more.

That's.. quite a lot of birds! Pretty cool you were able to capture em, right place at the right time, i suppose.

dlplumer

Very cool

DsrtVW

It was the first blast off of the morning caught in the stills. Then they go off to other ponds or head out of the refuge. This day they just settled back on to other ponds in the closed zone. They are recently arrived from the north so they did not go too far. I went around the auto tour route the second time the ones that went back to the same pond just looked at me, no take off. Only one performance that morning, but what a show

Lindiwe

Absolutely incredible. Must've been wonderful to actually be there... but failing that, these images sure do tell the story. While I enjoyed watching the video very much indeed, I find the still images are just as amazing. How do they manage not to crash into each other?

It's good to see that such giant flocks still exist. I hope we humans have the sense to make sure that our descendants have more than just stored images to watch.