We were driving home today and saw a fairly large flock of swans in a field near Sedro Wooley, WA.

Nice! That took what, 3 weeks from up here? I've got a varied thrush pigging out in a feeder up here; he should be in Sitka by now. Hope he makes it. We're supposed to have -10F tomorrow night. Not sure if he's a cavity nester like the chickadees.

http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Varied_Thrush/id

Ya, I saw my first flight of the season this past week near Sumas.
When do we get a season on those things? <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/notooth.gif" alt="" />

Swans in flight are an impressive sight. It has been a very long time since I have seen that sight.

On a related note, check this effort: http://www.operationmigration.org/

The Whooping Crane is another magnificent bird in flight....

There is a branch of the eastern flyway that goes thru Decatur, AL, and there's several large wildlife sanctuaries there (and some damn fine duck and goose shooting, too).

Go there during the migration, and you can't see the ground for the birds, and not very damn much of the water. Those flocks in flight will make your soul soar with them. I've seen swans, geese of all kinds, about a million kinds of ducks from some the size of yellow bathtub to turkey size, and an amazing number of non water birds of all descriptions, plus you can go upriver 30 miles and see the bald eagles at Guntersville State Park. I had gone 25 years (I was 5, in 1954, when I saw the last one) withoug seeing an eagle in the Tennessee River valley until I saw them at Guntersville. The Valley got a long term really heavy dose of DDT to control mosquitos, mostly right into the water, and the eagle shells were too fragile to incubate, so we lost our eagles early and often. The rest of you lost them later.

I've been setting pumps and filters the last several days, and I've been kept company by a whole flock of blue birds, over 100 of the pretty little buggers, flying up and watching me from the fence.

About this time of year in 1982, I reckon...

Some friends and I were at the local Boy Scout camp of my youth. Of course, we were grown and just in for a few hours visiting friends, but one of them asked if I'd like to paddle up the lake to do some work on a shelter not easily accessable by foot.

Understand that most of the lake is visable from the main part of the camp (especially from a large foot-bridge that rises from a coswalk that's the thoroughfare across the lake) except for about a third that's beyond an island. So, up the lake we paddled toward the island. We swang wide and paddled around the point. When we rounded the other side of the island, we got the hell scared our of us as several thousand Canadian Geese all took to the wing at one time.

We all just stopped paddling and watched. My feeble brain can't come up with words to describe it.

Magnificent.

Once the commotion subsided and the last of the geese had flown out of sight, the four of us sat there in the silence, absolutely convinced there is a God.

Whilst wiping goose sh*t off each other? <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

Thought about how lucky we were in that regard later...no wipage necessary. <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

What's cool and kind of sad to watch up here is the cranes congregating and leaving. We have a couple migratory waterfowl areas set up on the edge of Fairbanks.

One group will start chorusing and getting up into the air and start catching a thermal; more and more join the group, calling in a big ruckus, then at about 1000 ft, will turn and head up the flyway towards the Alaska range.

One fall, we were working on getting the cabin off the trailer and onto its pads, when we had a group of about a dozen tundra swans take off; apparently they had been feeding resting nearby. We didn't see them due to broken snow cover, so about all we could do was straighten up and watch them take off about shoulder level, and capture the image in our minds.

Here's where I wouldn't mind taking a fall visit; lord knows I've spent enough time in the State fixing aircraft.

http://www.friendsofthebosque.org/