For 18 months before Covid-19, I made numerous trips between our house in Danville (in the San Francisco Bay Area) and our apartment in LA. My thoroughfare for these trips, I-5, cuts a dreary path through central California, a place where novelty fades quickly. After a few hours on the road, sullen landscapes will slowly seep into the skin and choke the spirit. My only memory of those cheerless trips laid in the satisfaction of arrival.

Last year, during one such trip right before the start of the pandemic, I decided to spare myself. It was late winter. On the spur of the moment, I took a short detour. I headed east toward Modesto on Route 132, which, in a few miles, runs into the San Joaquin River National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge was established in the late ‘80s to protect a small habitat for migrating geese, specifically the Aleutian cackling geese. Guided by hotspots in the EBird app, I drove to an observation deck off a rural byway. My hope: a trail that might lead to a birding reward.

I had heard of migrating birds that winter in California. During the fall, large numbers of waterfowl - cackling geese, snow geese, Ross’s geese, sandhill cranes, white-fronted geese - migrate from way up north to spend a few months in the Central Valley. In early spring, they head back to their breeding grounds in Alaska, the Arctic tundra, and the northernmost reaches of Canada. I had no image of what to expect, other than a general notion of seeing something new. It was late afternoon, and the sun was low. Except for a few pipits and stilts, there was little bird activity. There were certainly no geese. It was all wrong. Late in the season, late in the day. The leisurely jaunt ended with a thud. After sundown, I left the deck. I drove home, pondering the miscalculation.

Over the next several months, I read and reread a few books - mostly on bird migrations and natural history. Slowly I began to realize that there is a rhythm to certain birds being present at different times of the year. A Reader’s Digest version of seasonal migrations of waterfowl might go something like this: The birds breed in the tundra, lay a clutch of eggs, raise their young chicks, and go through a molt cycle. As the days shorten in fall, they migrate south. Some winter in places like California’s Central Valley. Once in their wintering grounds, they sometimes pair-bond. Then, as daylight expands in spring, they fly back north to their breeding grounds and the cycle repeats itself.

In California, late fall is the time of the year for geese. I had shown up in late winter. That was the miscalculation. It meant that now I had to wait another six months to see them.

(Pictures were originally shot in RAW file format. Most of them were subsequently developed in Lightroom to create the images in the gallery. They are best viewed on a computer screen, and can also be clicked for full screen layout and download.)

Share this Story

Feb-March 2023

Uganda 2023

2022

November 26th, 2021

November 29th, 2020

September 2nd, 2020

November 26^th, 2021

November 29^th, 2020

September 2^nd, 2020