I don't yet have much knowledge of banded birds, but I saw a banded
Canada Goose on Sunday morning at about 9:00 am. The band was large,
white on black, but since Canada Geese are largely white and black, I
didn't realize it was banded until later in the day when I looked at
images from my morning walk. There were about seventeen geese in the
flock altogether.

Unfortunately, the goose was about 250 feet away and I was using a
digital zoom which heavily pixelizes the image. In the pictures, the
band is very small. I squinted at the images for several minutes and the
best I can make out is that there were letters running up the sides,
from bottom to top that said OFF or more probably CFF. On the front (and
perhaps the back which I couldn't see) there appeared to be three
numbers, but it was very difficult to distinguish them. They might have
been 000 or 500.

Is this type of band familiar to anyone? Even if I had realized I was
looking at a band when I was watching the geese, I don't think I could
have moved closer without spooking them. They stayed in the lagoon
resting and preening with gulls, crows, and killdeer plovers until about
10:30 or 11:00, then winged away en masse southwest across Puget Sound.

Mya Bell
myabell at 4-sightmedia.com