Cackling Geese

For the past couple of days I've been out trying to get decent views of three geese down stream from our water lake.  I was out for a drive on Monday with Hilary, trying to see what new species had arrived for the spring and to work on the Canadian Wildlife Service checklists I've been submitting this year. Hilary quickly fell asleep in her car seat and I was left to count gulls on my own.

As an aside… confound those gulls!  Why can't species fall into nice neat little packages like we want? I've been trying to get a better handle on the numbers of Iceland Gulls here amongst the Glaucous Gulls. It's an Iceland, no wait it's a Glaucous, no wait it's an Iceland… I'm starting to see Gulls in my sleep.

It was while I was counting the gulls that I heard the geese and found them fairly quickly.  I was somewhat surprised to see they were Canada Geese as they really aren't that common up here.  After awhile I moved on and later submitted my checklist.  It was after that that I really started to wonder.  I realized that these were fairly small geese, not much bigger than the gulls, and thought that they were more likely to be Cackling Geese. So I headed back out yesterday, better equipped and without my daughter so I could get a closer look.

Sure enough when I got closer and looked at them through the scope they were Cackling Geese, a little higher than the literature gives them credit for breeding, and hopefully they'll settle in to raise a family. Now, about that smaller gull in there amongst the seventy Glaucous Gulls…