Squaw Creek on March 7

On Thursday afternoon, I visited Squaw Creek Nature Preserve, around fifty miles to the south of Peru in Missouri.

As you can see from the official counts, the area attracts a huge assortment and impressive numbers of birds.

A severe allergic reaction to something laid me up for most of the week with hives (not pleasant) , but I decided to forget about steroids and the like and visited the sanctuary--and happy that I did, for the four hours of fresh air and noise served me well.

As you can see from the photographs, a few hundred thousand Snow Geese filled the water and the sky--down from a million from last month! 

The Trumpeter Swans kept their distance, so I did not get the shots I would have liked.  But as the short video of from my stay--sorry for the noise from the wind here and there--makes clear the birds made my stay both entertaining and loud.