For many late fall seasons, when we lived in San Francisco, Ivan and I would pack up our blue VW bug and head to Tulelake National Wildlife Refuge for the impressive spectacle of the fall migration of waterfowl. We were always astonished at the numbers of ducks, geese and swans there. A ranger once told us that we were looking at over a million Snow geese, several hundred thousand White-fronted geese, many hundreds of Tundra swans and uncounted thousands of several duck species. It was an awesome spectacle. As the years progressed we gradually stopped going up there, but, when I saw we'd be in the vicinity with this trip, I made sure we'd go. Yesterday was that day!
I have to tell you that we were a bit early for the full migration - we used to go in late October, even into November. There were no Snow geese, but we saw thousands of various ducks and 2 species of goose. Even saw several of my favorite Buffleheads, although we saw only females.
Another bird in great abundance was one I hadn't seen in many years, the Western grebe. Again, for the non-birders, this is a very elegant waterbird. The bird is about the size of a Mallard, but has a long thin neck, dull yellow bill and a bright red eye. These beautiful birds are renown for their exotic mating/courting/pair bonding dance. (This was the event I thought I'd never see!) This dance is generally begun with the male and female bobbing their heads to each other, then they swim side by side, bobbing heads, and then the most fabulous thing happens. Simultaneously they rise up in the water and run together across the water in perfect unison. The dance ends with each bird entering the water head first and disappearing from view for a few seconds. As I noted before, it happened so fast, neither Ivan nor I was able to get any sort of image of it. I went to YouTube and found a 23-second video which shows exactly what we saw. This is the link to the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GOWRK5ic7E. Ivan and I were speechless after we saw this! It was thrilling!
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