Snow Geese Migration — Bosque del Apache

Each November through February, the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico hosts the most dramatic snow goose and sandhill crane staging spectacle in North America, with the dawn lift-off of 50,000 snow geese from the refuge ponds — a roaring, white-winged explosion of birds rising simultaneously into the pink desert dawn sky — creating one of the continent's most overwhelming wildlife events. The snow geese's morning departure from their roost ponds, timed to the minute of nautical twilight each day, produces a sound described by veteran wildlife observers as resembling an approaching freight train, the combined wingbeats and calls of 50,000 geese audible from five kilometres before the birds become visible above the cottonwood treeline. The evening return — skeins of geese and cranes descending in from the darkening Chihuahuan Desert sky onto the glittering refuge ponds with the Chupadera Mountains silhouetted against the sunset — is equally overwhelming and entirely different in character. Sandhill cranes in their thousands feed alongside the geese on the refuge cornfields during the day, and the combined biomass of these two species — a total of 80,000 birds at peak — creates a wildlife concentration without parallel in the American Southwest. The Festival of the Cranes each November draws wildlife observers from across the continent specifically for this spectacle.