Greetings All,







This past weekend Shawneen Finnegan and I led a couple of field trips at
the
Pacific City Birding and Blues Festival in Pacific City, Oregon. As some
of you may know, this area serves as the wintering grounds for the modest
population of Semidi Islands Aleutian Cackling Geese. Having never seen
these birds, we spent about two hours Sunday morning studying them at
the Martella Dairy/Woods County Park pastures just n. of Pacific City.
In addition to the Semidis, this pasture and others along Little
Nestucca River Rd. and in the Nestucca Bay NWR hosted about 3000
Aleutian Cackling Geese. In one pasture along Little Nestucca River Rd.
we found a pure flock of about 2400 Aleutians on Friday afternoon.







When we arrived on Friday afternoon we had distant views of some of the
Semidis, but weren't able to see them up close. Fortunately, on Sunday
we found a group of about 100 mixed Aleutians (Semidis and non-Semidis)
just off the little side road on the south side of the Martella Dairy.
We parked less than 50 yards from the edge of this loose flock and I
took several hundred photos. We enjoyed great side-by-side views of
Semidis and typical Aleutians and I captured of number of nice
comparative images.







In addition to these birds, Shawneen picked out an extremely pale (near
white-breasted) Cackling Goose way out in the field. It never came very
close, but I've included both distant and heavily-cropped images showing
it in the context of the much darker Cacklers present. Also, there were a handful of
"Ridgway's" Cackling Geese (B. h. minima) in the Martella
pasture, including one (see photo in the gallery) that showed the most
extensive white cheek patch that I can recall seeing on a Cackling
Goose.







Please feel free to offer comments about these images and please add
them directly to the BirdFellow photo page so they can be archived with
the images. When viewing the images, if you roll your mouse cursor over
the larger featured image to the right of the thumbnails you will see
the captions that I added. If you click on the featured image, you will
get a full-size image (sans captions). The gallery can be viewed at
this link: Pacific City Aleutians Photo Gallery







Dave Irons

Content Editor BirdFellow.com