Snow geese are white-bodied geese with black wing tips and tail feathers barely visible on the ground, but noticeable in flight. Usually they are more often heard before they are seen with a shrill cacophony of honking much higher up and with more rapid wing beats than their Canada cousins.
They do not like to travel without the company of another dozen or so geese and can form flocks of hundreds up to a thousand or more, already sighted in spring migration over Pennsylvania and headed this way north toward their Canada coastal breeding grounds. If lucky enough to watch one of these flights swirl down from the sky, it has been described as like standing in a snow globe as they blanket the ground in the flurry of a sudden blizzard.
Snow geese are closely related to the blue goose species in a morph controlled by a single gene. White starts to become blue in one subsequent generation, as opposed to the seasonal adaptation of camouflaging with rotating weather conditions, creating variables much like the northern partridge-like ptarmigan, the ermine weasel, and arctic fox. Native Americans were more deeply aware of environmental phenomena and read into them spiritual meaning, such as the appearance of one white buffalo once every hundred years or so – not an albino pigment deficiency, but a genetic roll of the dice, and a sacred omen of good fortune for the immediate future from past experience in their history.
How lucky is it for you and I to look skyward when the chilled stillness of the pale blue Buzzards Bay sky of late winter is broken by the shrill clarion of a lofty flock of snow geese, raising our hopes for an early spring, a heavenly orchestration as thrilling as the dramatic Hallelujah chorus of Handel’s immortal Messiah masterpiece. My subsequent message of a forecast for snow geese has a double meaning as a wish with you for an optimistic sun sign just over the horizon.
By George B. Emmons