Several Snow Geese fly out of the farmer’s field next to Chapel Road at the Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area in Klinefeltersville, PA on Sunday 2-20-2011.

For more information on Snow Geese, visit the Cornelll Lab Of Ornithology.

I blended several textures from the commercially available texture packs from Distressed Textures to give the sky a painterly effect.

Thousands of Snow Geese take off at one time from a farmer’s cornfield at the Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area in Klinefeltersville, PA on Sunday 2-20-2011. The geese typically take off in the morning and head out to the surrounding farm fields in search of plants to eat then they fly back into the safety of the lake area in the afternoon. By mid-March these flights will contain as many as 100,000 birds.

D7000 with Sigma 50-500mm. F7.1 @ 1/1250th ISO 160.

Three Snow Geese fly in formation overhead at the Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area in Klinefeltersville, PA on Sunday 2-20-2011. The Pennsylvania Game Commission web site said on 2-17-2011 that because of temperatures in the mid to upper 60s on two days this week, the ice has begun to thaw on both the lake and the pond and the Snow Geese population was estimated at 55,000 with Canada Geese around 1,800 and Tundra swans near 700. Back at the Chapel Road parking lot I spotted a flock of Snow Geese working the corn field and I’d estimate they were somewhere in the 10,000 range. There are also Hooded Mergansers, about ten males and two females, in the roadside pond by the visitor center. Also in the pond were half a dozen Canada Geese, a handful of Wigeon and several Ring Necked Ducks.

I shot everything today with the D7000 and the Sigma 50-500mm. I still need to work out several of the settings. The biggest conclusion I came up with is the buffer size is definitely smaller than on the D300 and I also need to step up to the Sandisk Extreme Pro 45MB/s write speed SDHC cards. The Sandisk Ultra SDHC cards that I bought when I got the camera only write at at 15MB/s and that’s really hurting the buffer performance on flight shots where I need to record bursts. The other conclusion I made is that when recording video, auto focus tracking is not a realistic option. Manual focus is a must for tracking moving subjects in video. I tried that but when you shoot video, you are shooting in live view mode and not through the view finder’s optical eyepiece and on a sunny day that means you really can’t see the monitor well enough to manually focus the video. So when I came home, I ordered a Zacuto ViewFinder Pro 3X. That should give me much better focusing capabilities for video and supposedly it pops right off for when I want to go back to shooting stills. I guess we’ll see. The other thing I learned is that although I purchased a Rode VideoMic Pro external mono-directional microphone for recording audio for the videos, it doesn’t actually record audio unless you remember to turn it on. Yes, I am in idiot. Live and learn I guess. LOL

For more information on Snow Geese, visit the Cornelll Lab Of Ornithology.

Some of the 120,000-150,000 Snow Geese that visit the Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area in Klinefeltersville, PA during February and March of each year. I shot this back on 3-7-2010. How they don’t all fly into one another is beyond my comprehension.

For more information on Snow Geese, visit the Cornelll Lab Of Ornithology.

Tundra Swan flying over the lake at Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area in Klinefeltersville, PA on Monday 2-23-2009.

For more information about Tundra Swans, visit this page at the Cornell Lab Of Ornithology.

hree Canada Geese hit a wind gust head on while traveling over the lake at Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area in Klinefeltersville, PA on Monday 2-23-2009. The wind was whipping around pretty good and when flocks of birds would fly over head, often times their horizontal progress was abruptly changed into a vertical launch when they hit one of the wind gusts. This would send them into all sorts of maneuvers to try and go around the gust or abort their flight plans all together and return to the lake.

For more information about Canada Geese, visit this page at the Cornell Lab Of Ornithology.

Tundra Swan conducts the orchestra in a rousing rendition of, what else, “Swan Lake”.   Taken at Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area on Monday 2-23-2009.

Adult Tundra Swan flying from the lake over Klinfeltersville Road to the pond at Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area in Klinefeltersville, PA on Monday 2-23-2009.

When I was at Middle Creek on Saturday, a good portion of the lake and pond were frozen over and the Tundra Swans were hiding behind the trees along the road which made them somewhat hard to photograph. Today was just the opposite. The lake and pond were 80% ice free and the Swans and Canada Geese were flying like crazy in the early afternoon hours. These Tundra Swans are immense and when they fly over you they sometimes make a sound like an old car horn as they communicate to one another in flight. It’s was well worth the freezing cold and driving winds that today offered, just to be able to photograph these beautiful creatures in flight.

For more information about Tundra Swans, visit this page at the Cornell Lab Of Ornithology.

The sound of the Geese on the Willow Point trail is already at a constant low roar.  When there are three times as many Geese in a few weeks, it’s going to be pretty honkin’ loud back there.    It’s interesting to see the fly-ins and fly-outs that occur and how the shift in ratio of Snow Geese to Canada Geese in any one area of the WMA changes from hour to hour.  The Tundra Swans were the most elusive but also the most interesting, hiding behind tree cover in the area closest to Kleinfelstersville Rd.

I also had the chance to photograph some Raptors while I was there including this Red Tail Hawk that circled silently above for about five minutes before moving on over the farm fields in search of small mammals to eat.

Here are two Adult Snow Geese and one White-Morph Juvenile Snow Goose flying over the Willow Point section of the WMA.