Raucous bird tornado touches down as snow geese make annual flight to Arctic
KLEINFELTERSVILLE, Pa. (AP) — A few dozen bird watchers gathered in the pre-dawn darkness to wait for the moment when thousands of migrating snow geese stop honking and preening and suddenly take flight from a Pennsylvania reservoir.
The mesmerizing spectacle, about an hour after sunrise, ended almost as soon as it began. The birds circled several times, then headed toward nearby agricultural fields, searching for unharvested grain and other sustenance on their epic spring flight north into New York State and Quebec.
The Pennsylvania Reservoir was built a half-century ago to attract waterfowl, and over the years the flock has grown. Payton Miller, an environmental education specialist with the Pennsylvania Game Commission, described it as a raucous bird tornado lifting off the water.
“Just coming here on a really beautiful morning where there’s a huge early morning flight and it reminds me how awesome it is to see such a large number of such a beautiful bird,” Miller said. “I never get tired of it.”
Among those who got it all was Adrian Binns, a safari guide from Paoli, Pennsylvania, who visited the Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area for “the thrill of seeing something you don’t see every day.”
Snow geese have been arriving in increasing numbers at the 6,300-acre (25-square-kilometer) Middle Creek property since the late 1990s. At this time of year, they have spent months along the Atlantic coast from southern New Jersey to the Carolinas, many of them wintering on the Delmarva Peninsula that forms the Chesapeake Bay.
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See photographer Robert F. Bukaty’s full gallery of AP photos of snow geese at Middle Creek here.
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They don’t stay long at Middle Creek – it’s just a stop on their journey to the summer breeding grounds of the Canadian Arctic and west Greenland. But for a few weeks, they are the main attraction at Middle Creek, which draws about 150,000 visitors a year, including about a thousand hunters.
The Pennsylvania Game Commission, which owns Middle Creek, says about 100,000 snow geese were roosting there on its busiest day last year, a figure comparable to the recent peak in activity but lower than the single-day record of about 200,000 on Feb. 21, 2018.
Snow geese are doing well, but their large numbers come at a cost. According to a 2017 study published by Springer Nature, the population of greater snow geese increased from about 3,000 at the start of the 20th century to some 700,000 in the 1990s. By some estimates, about a million birds – as well as perhaps 10 million lesser snow geese, which are smaller – also breed in the Arctic.
The number of migratory tundra swans in Middle Creek, although much lower, has also increased over time, from a dozen in the mid-1970s to 5,000 or more in recent years. Middle Creek birders have also identified more than 280 species of birds at the site, including bald eagles, northern harriers, ospreys and owls.
As snow geese numbers have exploded in recent decades, wildlife officials in the United States and Canada have had to balance hunting regulations, concerns about crop damage, shifts in migration and changes in wintering patterns. The environmental damage caused by overgrazing in the Arctic has led experts to conclude that the birds are overabundant.
David M. Bird, a professor of wildlife biology at McGill University, described the population as “probably one of the biggest conservation issues facing wildlife biologists in North America today.” Snow geese feed by pulling up plants by the roots, which damages their habitat, that of various birds and other wildlife.
The Pennsylvania Game Commission reported recently that avian flu viruses, present in the state since 2022, continue to circulate among the state’s wild birds. The hunting agency asked for the public’s help in reporting sick or dead wild birds and reported that about 2,000 wild bird carcasses — mostly snow geese — had to be removed from a quarry a few miles north of Bethlehem in December and January.
Bird said that for nature lovers, snow geese can be a delight, but for farmers, they are a pest. For hunters, they are food, but for animal rights activists, they are a species that needs protection, he said.
“But if you are a paid professional wildlife manager at the municipal, state or federal level whose difficult job is to try to please all of the aforementioned parties, then you will undoubtedly experience many sleepless nights in the fall when the geese arrive,” Bird said.
