Bird thoughts

A couple weeks ago I went on a walk over by the Mississippi river to see if I could find some geese or turkeys. I was able to find some geese and I snuck my way close enough to one to get this picture that I'm pretty happy about:

You can see the white of it's shut eyelid!

The geese where pulling at washed up seaweed while standing in the sand. I slowly approached them as quietly as possible through the cover of trees. The leaves crunched under my feet so I had to move quite slowly to avoid making a ruckus. As I grew closer the geese eventually took notice of me, so I just froze in place and made sure not to look in their direction. They quickly lost interest in me and went about their normal business. I turned my head towards them and started taking some pictures here and there. Eventually after about 15 minutes of waiting they both took a little nap together. This is one of them.

This is the first time I've seen a goose sleep on one leg, but it is a thing I've noticed some other birds do when they're standing in the water. They were standing at the part of the shore where small waves came up and wetted the sand. My theory is they were standing on one leg as to maintain body temperature, maybe they don't want more contact with the water then they need if it's cold while resting. I'm not entirely sure why they didn't just walk fully onto the land to sleep though, that way they could lay down like they normally do when I see them nap.

After some time the geese waddled on down the river. I waited for them to completely leave and inspected where they were just napping. I found this cute little goose print left in the sand

Anyways, I went back there today to go try and find some geese again (though I didn't bring my camera this time). I was able to find 2 geese that I watched at a distance, one was larger and one smaller. The large one was on alert with his head high in the air looking out while the small one ate grass. There were a few groups of people near them and the large one looked uncomfortable with the situation to me. He started to signal that he wanted to leave by tilting its head back (if you've never seen that before, this is what it looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKPrslgS1g8 ). The small goose was too busy eating the grass to notice though. The large goose kept signaling, and it seemed like at this point the small goose was just ignoring it while munching. It kept eating for another 5 minutes or so before it started mimicking the behavior. Then they started honking and took off (as is normal), with the small goose leading in the front. It surprised me to see that the goose that originally signaled to leave wasn't taking the front. I wonder if the last goose to agree to leave is more often taking the front position, or if it just has to do more with where they happened to be already standing when they agreed to leave.

I think large birds are underappreciated by birders. I'm yet to take part in any sort of birding group, but it seems that they tend to go for song birds and raptors more often. What about the geese and turkeys! Maybe they're not enough of a challenge to them? I think they're quite interesting though. Larger birds are comfortable with you getting much closer, and you can see their behavior in much more detail. And turkeys are especially underappreciated! They cannot fly much, they cannot move fast, and they don't care about someone who's 30 feet away from them. They're the only wild bird around here that you can follow the whole daily routine of, all without even bothering them. A couple of years ago I decided to find where the turkeys in my area sleep, so I followed a group of them for about 4 hours until sundown. They lead me to their tree and I watched them one by one fly up one by one and go to sleep. There is no other bird you can follow the routine of so closely.

Besides bird thoughts

In other news, besides my bird thoughts, I was lucky enough to have tabf5 make me my own tabling! It's a combination of a goose and the blindfold that Themis the greek goddess of justice wears (my name is also Themis!). The statue you often see outside of courts with the blindfolded woman holding a scale and sword (lady justice) is like the modern depiction of Themis.

I 3D printed it as well! I'd like to get around to painting it one of these days too perhaps.

Anyways, I should get to bed now! I wish you all a nice day