I am always happy for the approach of spring. Any season that replaces winter is OK by me, even if the season of mud does little to earn my affection beyond ushering away subzero temperatures.
Hunting, other than snow goose spring depredation hunts, is off the table, and while fishing has its moments, a skwala hatch here or there, spring is mostly a waiting game.
Even still, there’s wonder in the sky.
The reason so many states offer “no rules, no limits” spring hunts for snow geese is the bird’s population might be at an all-time high. It’s certainly higher than it’s been anytime before in the wildlife-management era. The birds are so numerous they are damaging the tundra of their summer breeding grounds north of the Arctic Circle.
It’s a pretty remarkable comeback for a bird that was in such decline in the early 20th century that hunting snows was banned.
They’re back, however, and skeins of snow geese fill the skies in the southern and central states. They’re working their way north to Freezeout Lake on the Montana prairie, where the birds gather in flocks dense enough to resemble smoke when they take flight.
During this present Spring of Deception, it is warm enough on the Great Plains that I’ve resumed my afternoon jogs. I run on a trail near the river where the migrating birds are staging before they push on for the Northwest Territories.
Canada geese are strung out above the river as they return from nearby fields where they fatten themselves on waste grain. More recently, Sandhill cranes began filtering in. I usually hear cranes before I see them. Their psychedelic trill is unmistakable as it reverberates through the cottonwoods.
Once I hear cranes I scan the dark threads above the river for flappy wings. Crane wingbeats are more casual than geese, especially on their commutes from field to roost. From a distance, it is otherwise hard to tell cranes and Canada geese apart.
The crane’s lackadaisical wingbeats are the giveaway.
The smaller a migrating bird, however, the more earnest and precise its wingbeats. At the small end of the spectrum are green-winged teal. A handful of these plucky ducks have arrived and even from a distance, you can’t mistake their fury.
If a mallard tried beating its wings at the rate of a teal it would soon keel over with at least a cramp. If a Canada goose tried to keep up, a migration-ending rotator-cuff injury seems the certain outcome.
But snow geese outnumber the rest of the waterfowl along my jogging path, probably by multiples of 10. The din of the flocks, as they ready themselves for flight, surges across the prairie. You hear the birds the way you hear whitewater as you drift ever nearer down a river canyon. You hear it telegraphed through the hair standing on the back of your neck as much as you do with your ears.
The energy of a continent is contained in their cries.
The flights emerge first as a cloud, then as discordant strings of birds slowly synchronizing. Snows are usually a little jumbled compared to the tight V’s Canada geese quickly form, even when they’re on short commutes. But once snows have time to assemble, no other waterfowl puts on this kind of spectacle.
I’m probably exaggerating, though just a little, but I recall one spring a flight of snow geese — their V formations overlapping so they resembled the scales of a fish — that seemed to go on for 10 minutes as it passed. Even if it was just five, that’s a lot of tundra-consuming feathers and wings honking overhead.
Honk doesn’t seem the right word. Canada geese honk, like a clown-horn prop, but the call of a snow is plaintive, desperate.
They’ve reason to be. Some snow geese migrate 3,000 miles to breed and they’re not even halfway there.