david@star2.cm.utexas.edu (David Sigeti) (01/17/91)
In article <11246@helios.TAMU.EDU> e343gv@tamuts.tamu.edu (Gary Varner) writes: Last night near dusk I was lying in the bed of my truck fishing a wire through the molding when I saw what I first thought to be a flock of 30-50 geese flying north-northwest (bearing about 330 degrees). But they weren't honking so much as sqwaking, and as I looked I realized that their legs were trailing behind them like cranes. I figured they _had_ to be sandhills (if you hear hoofbeats, it's probably a horse, rather than a zebra), but I grabbed the binoculars from my glove compartment and looked. They were cranes all right, but the most striking thing about them was the _black_tips_on_their_ _white_wings_. I couldn't recall from memory how to tell a sandhill from a whooper, so I assumed that this was the field sign of the sandhills. But lo, the fieldguide I consulted later confirmed that they could have been nothing else but whoopers! My questions are: (1) could I possibly have made a mistake, and (2) what are they doing so far from the Aransas at this time of year? Is there _anything_ with a flight profile like a crane and black tips on white wings? Are they heading for Alberta already? I think that it is virtually impossible for the birds you saw to have been Whoopers. They certainly won't be headed north yet -- they don't leave until late March or early April. The adults and their chicks of the previous summer have winter territories that they do not leave until migration. They are never found in groups of more than three at a time (mother, father, and chick). The adolescents have less defined territories but I don't think that they ever leave the refuge or at least the immediate vicinity. They do gather in small groups but never in numbers like you are reporting -- there are almost certainly not 30 adolescents in the whole Texas colony. There are lots of kinds of large white birds with white wing tips. Snow geese (as you originally thought), white ibises, and white pelicans to name some species that are common in your area in the winter. -- David Sigeti david@star2.cm.utexas.edu cmhl265@hermes.chpc.utexas.edu