zaterdag 4 december 2010

A mixture of geese near the IJssel

Today, my father and I did a small tour in our county to see if  we would find any unexpected winter guests. We started at one of our usual winter patches: a small stream of water where we've seen Water rails, Snipes, Woodcocks, Jack Snipes past winter. Today, we did not find anything worth mentioning. We decided to drive towards the IJssel. Our first stop was Empe, a good spot for Bitterns, Smews, Goosanders etc. The water had turned into ice so no birds were found there unfortunately. There were only tiny openings in the ice but nothing unusual was found there. Our second stop was a place near Voorst where we always find good amounts of geese. This time, lots of geese were found as well. In total we saw 5 (excluding Egyptian geese) species of geese. Approximately 4000 White-fronted geese, 8 Tundra Bean Geese (scarce winter visitor here), 15 Barnacle Geese, 30 Greylag geese and the best goose I found there was a Pink-footed Goose! A nice addiotion to my county yearlist. Another funny thing we noticed was that regularly/constantly small groups of White-fronts (including some Bean Geese) flew to the river and landed in the IJssel to quench their thirst!
Around 12.00 p.m it started snowing and soon everything was covered with snow again. The ''snowstorm'' lasted till 17.00 p.m. There's a thick layer of snow (more or less 10 cm) now.

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