Lucky Birding Find in Fort Collins
On Feb. 2 I took my camera (with the 100-400mm lens) to a local park where we’d seen a lot of redheads the day before. Most of the reservoir was iced over but there was still room in the middle for a lot of waterfowl.
Once again – I saw dozens of redheads, along with hundreds of Canada and cackling geese, and lots of ring-necked ducks, mallards, a few common mergansers, and a couple of coots and wigeons. Pretty normal for winter at this park…
Until I noticed something unusual. In with the cackling geese – another goose with a white head. At first I thought it might be a hybrid of some sort. But when I got home and took a look at the shots, it was definitely a snow goose (you can tell by the ‘grin patch’ or black area around the bill that looks kind of like a whale baleen). Undeniably a snow goose, but I’d never seen one like this.
I posted it in Facebook and soon had my thought confirmed – I’m 99% sure this was a dark morph snow goose, also known as a ‘blue goose’!
This color variation is very rare, only 1-3% of snow geese have it. And snow geese in Fort Collins at all is also quite rare. So I feel really lucky to have seen this bird! The dark morph is definitely a lifer for me.