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Plan to
Attend the Tenth
Annual Snow Goose Update
Where’s the geese? That’s the most asked question I get leading up to the Festival every February. The answer is – that depends. We can point you to their most common roosting sites – bodies of water that they spend the night on sleeping and resting before they fly off in the morning. During the day, they travel miles to find food in fields of corn stubble or winter wheat. That can be anywhere and change from day to day. Another big factor is the weather! If the lakes freeze over, they will move to find open water. This year the snow geese started to arrive around Thanksgiving in large numbers and we estimated about 100,000 birds before Christmas! Since then, we’ve had some freezing temperatures and lakes freezing over, so some birds have moved further south. With cold weather to the north, it may push more birds our way. By the end of February, birds should be on their way back north again. So, we never know what we’re going to get, but we keep a close eye on them in preparation for your arrival festival weekend!
The lesser snow geese you will see at the High Plains Snow Goose Festival are part of the Western Central Flyway population that are on their way back to the Canadian Arctic where they nest. This flock winters in southeastern Colorado, New Mexico, the Texas panhandle and northern Mexico. Lesser snow geese come in two different color phases within the same species. In the white phase, the geese are as white as snow except for the black wing tips. The other phase, called blue geese, is slate gray with a white head. Both have a dark “grinning patch” on the sides of their bill. Ross Geese: Mixed in the flocks of snow geese you may find some Ross’s geese, which look very much like snow geese except that they are about 2/3 the size of snow geese and do not have the grinning patch. Ross’s geese weigh about 3-3 ½ pounds and snow geese weigh between 5-6 pounds. In the arctic, snow geese graze on grasses and sedges that grow in the tundra. While migrating through the prairies of North America, they will also feed on leftover grain in the fields.
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In spring, waves of bright white snow geese against an endless blue sky fly into southeastern Colorado. They roost on the scattered lakes on the prairie and feed in the surrounding fields, making the area a favorite rest stop on their annual migration. Lesser snow geese are considered to be the most abundant goose in the world and number at least 6 million. There are four distinct populations recognized.