Rivière du Loup, Quebec. September 27 2022. Every early March I use these pages to celebrate Trumpeter Swans and how they usher in spring with their sensational migratory return. Well now, six months later, I experienced those same exhilarating sights and sounds, this time of hundreds of Snow Geese in their southbound, fall migration. Doing much the same thing as those swans except the geese (just as white and just as sparkling in the sun) are paving the way for cold seasons to come. Still, there is something really spine-tingling about the sight and sounds of clouds of excited white birds following a course inherited from ancestors through many thousands of generations.
Our Snow Goose experience came this morning as we whiled away time waiting for the noon ferry to take us north across the St. Lawrence River to St. Simeon on the far shore. As we gazed across the scenically spectacular river, we could hear what we though were gulls calling behind us, far in land. I shrugged for a few minutes but eventually a shoulder-tap realization, ‘those-aren’t-gulls-they’re-geese,’ got through to me and I turned to see a blizzard of Snow Geese.
Snow Geese nest in hundreds of thousands in the Hudson Bay lowlands; their spring and fall migrations are always spectacular. Perhaps locals get used to them but birders are awestruck at any time while hunters can hardly wait for their fall arrival. We rarely see Snow Geese on Lake Ontario, their migratory path passes far east of us. But today I was in the right place for perhaps this autumn’s first wave, there will be many to come through October and early November; hundreds of thousands of them.
It took us a bit of needless driving to finally find the flock on a recently harvested field. There were small groups of Canada Geese dotted around too, they’ll often clean up spilled grain and I suspect the Snows spotted them from high above and promptly crashed the gleaning party. The Snow Geese were noisy and restless while the Canadas watched from margins with a sort of who-invited-them demeanour. 
For a while, noisy groups of Snow Geese came and went, large groups arriving from the north parachuting in and small excited clusters taking off, circling around and catching up on gossip. Then something serious alarmed them and in a mass of urgent honking and gurgling all the Snow Geese lifted off and streamed low over us. They were last seen swirling over a cityscape behind.