Missoula Notebook
Goose Dawn on Freezeout Lake
By Sutton Stokes, 3-31-08
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| Michael Schwitters, Choteau's resident goose expert, peers into his spotting scope by Freezeout Lake. | |
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Just a few minutes before dawn and a five-vehicle convoy is setting out from the parking lot of the Freezeout Lake Wildlife Management Area Headquarters, on the eastern Rocky Mountain Front near Choteau. The plan is to drive down the gravel road toward Pond 6 with our headlights off so as not to disturb the geese, but the convoy has gotten moving too quickly for me to warn anyone that the headlights on my 1998 Toyota Corolla burn whether you want them to or not. The SUV ahead of me lurches to a stop and the driver jogs back to remind me of the plan. I explain the problem and he stares at me blankly for a second before climbing back into his truck. The two lead vehicles are already far ahead, bouncing down the rough road, their orange parking lights winking in the darkness, and we’ll have to hurry now to catch up.
I will later learn that the lights-off rule is not an absolute necessity, but as we drive I am worried. Will my headlights spook the geese into a pre-dawn departure, when they would otherwise wait until just after dawn to take off? Will I ruin the “seventh wonder of the natural world” — as Professor Greene calls it — that about 20 teachers, students and tag-alongs like me are here to see? About 50 yards in, though, the road’s slight downward grade suggests a solution. I kill the engine and, with it, my headlights, and coast the next 500 yards in neutral and in darkness.
The eastern horizon is pinkening with the first hint of dawn, but the sky above us is inky black. All around, still invisible in the gloom, 35,000 geese are starting to think about breakfast.
Erick Greene, a biology professor at the Univerisity of Montana, has been organizing trips to Freezeout Lake for about six years now. The trips are always in late March, for that is when — as regular as clockwork — the white geese arrive from their California wintering grounds, stopping to rest and feed until their surging hormones drive them northward once again, to their summer breeding areas in Canada, Alaska and Russia.
The birds’ annual arrival at Freezeout Lake isn’t the only thing that happens like clockwork. While the geese lay over on the lake, their daily itinerary is as tightly scheduled as any cruise ship passenger’s. After overnighting on the water, they begin to stir with the sunrise. A little after 7 a.m., they lift off en masse and fly east to Fairfield Bench, spreading out across the 40 or so square miles of wide blonde fields that produce the barley for Budweiser beer. After gorging themselves for a few hours on the waste grains left behind from last fall’s barley harvest, the geese grow thirsty and return to the lake around mid-morning, where they drink and rest for a few hours before repeating the whole process later in the afternoon.
As this cycle unfolds over a period of several weeks, some flights of birds are arriving and some are departing. Freezeout Lake is a way station along what is known to goose people as the Pacific flyway, a migration route followed by an estimated one million geese, though of course there are never a million geese at Freezeout Lake on any given day. The all-time record is about 400,000; the day of our visit, there were an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 geese in the area. These numbers are according to Michael Schwitters, a Choteau resident, Air Force retiree and lifelong bird watcher (of the subspecies known as “lister”) who has managed, late in life, to remake himself into a world-class authority on goose behavior simply by doing what surfers call “following your bliss.”
“He’s an amateur in the classic sense of the word,” says Professor Greene. “By that I mean someone who does something just for the love of it. He didn’t start doing this until he retired, and he just sort of stumbled onto it, but now he’s probably spent more time observing these birds than any professional, degreed ornithologist. It would be interesting to know just how much of what we know about geese is thanks to him — I would bet it’s a lot.”
At the moment, just about everything I know about geese I learned from a half-hour presentation Schwitters made to the UM group at his house on Wednesday, the night before he led our convoy down that gravel road to Freezeout Lake, as well as from the questions I peppered him with as our convoy followed the birds around on Thursday, back and forth on the network of unpaved farm service roads that crisscross Fairfield Bench. Along the way, I became fascinated by Schwitters himself, as I am by anyone who follows an unorthodox path toward living exactly the life he wants to live.
Originally from Iowa, Schwitters fell in love with the eastern Rocky Mountain Front during two tours of duty at Malmstrom Air Force Base, near Great Falls, and he and his wife moved to Choteau for good upon his retirement, about 25 years ago. The natural setting — which is to say, the birds — were the main attraction.
“I’m a bird watcher,” says Schwitters, a compact man with an easy grin who wears his white hair cropped high and tight and who nods enthusiastically when I ask if he’s a fan of a certain Hitchcock movie. “Most of what I do in life is just trying to get to places where I can see really neat birds.”
In 1989, a few years after settling in Choteau, Schwitters was down at Freezeout Lake looking at geese through his telescope when he noticed a bird wearing a red plastic collar, about two inches wide, with visible numbers and letters. Jotting down the characters, he made some calls and eventually got in touch with a Canadian researcher working for something called the Arctic Goose Joint Venture, an international project that bands geese in their northern nesting grounds and then tries to “re-sight” them later, as a means of understanding things like goose population sizes, migration routes, mating behaviors and survival rates.
Schwitters asked the Canadian researcher question after question. He learned that the red band meant that his goose had been tagged on Wrangel Island, in Russia, some 2,600 miles from Freezeout Lake. The researcher told him he might also see blue bands from Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay area (about 1,900 miles from Freezeout), black bands from the western Canadian Arctic (also about 1,900 miles) and yellow bands from the Queen Maude Gulf Migratory Bird Sanctuary in Nunavut, Canada (about 1,500 miles). He also learned that, while the project was having no trouble getting the bands onto large numbers of birds, they hadn’t been able to gather as much information as they wanted about where the birds were ending up. In fact, Schwitters’s report was the first the project had received from Montana, despite the fact that the state had long been known as a major way station for migrating geese.
Struck by the American’s enthusiasm, the Canadian researcher asked Schwitters a few questions about the quality of his telescope and then asked him if he wouldn’t mind reporting any other collars he spotted, along with the date and time and what the bird was doing. Figuring he’d be looking at birds every day either way, Schwitters agreed. Neither Schwitters nor the Canadian researcher had any idea that this small step would lead to momentous changes not only in Schwitters’s life but also — it’s no exaggeration to say — what science knows about white geese in general.
As he made his next reports to the Arctic Goose Joint Venture’s data team, recalls Schwitters, “they were evaluating the records that I was inputing, specifically looking at whether I was submitting codes that did not exist, as a way of doing quality control.” But as it became clear that Schwitters had a sharp and reliable eye, his fame began to spread among other scientists who also desperately needed field observations of banded waterfowl. The next call came from Canadian wildlife officials.
“They were thinking, ‘here’s a guy with a powerful telescope who really likes to look at geese,’” Schwitters recalls. “They offered to pay my mileage if I’d go up and do some spotting in Saskatchewan.”
This call was soon followed by others, from both university and government scientists in both the U.S. and Canada, and so the grand adventure began. Between 1989 and last Wednesday evening, the night before our convoy set out for Freezeout Lake, Schwitters had submitted 51,571 complete reports of banded birds, probably more than any other person in North America and maybe even the world. These reports consist of sightings of 47 different banded species and sub-populations in locations as far north as the Canadian Arctic, as far south as Mexico, and in 21 U.S. states in between, including the Alaskan Aleutian Islands, all for no more compensation than paid mileage and occasional room and board.
“I’ve looked at about 15 million goose necks so far,” says Schwitters. “And I’ve had a really good time.”
The pink light is starting to bleed from the eastern horizon into the sky overhead as our convoy eases to a stop near Pond 6. (Freezeout Lake was once one large body of water, but the state divided it into “ponds” in the 1950s for flood control.) The Corolla’s dashboard thermometer gives the outside temperature as 24 degrees Fahrenheit. Bundled against the cold, the professors and students pile out of the vehicles, setting up cameras, binoculars and spotting scopes.
It is still too dark to see the geese, but there is no missing the sound of them, a dull honking tumult out on the water, disorganized and chaotic, thousands of muttered drowsy harrumphs about the cold and the early hour. (I’m anthropomorphizing here, which scientists hate, but whatever.) Schwitters guesses we are hearing about 4,000 birds on Pond 6, with dozens of similar groups spread out across the rest of the lake. I stand and listen and wait, shoulders hunched against the biting cold.
As the sky grows lighter, I can make out more details in the rolling prairie landscape around us. There is no wind, and the deep grass bordering the lake stands as still as if it were frozen. Inch by inch, the sun begins to climb around the curve of the earth, painting a slowly widening band of pink light downward from the snow-smudged peaks of the Rockies to our west.
And at last we can see the geese, a big white blob of them out on the water perhaps a quarter mile away, such a large blob that — on my own — I wouldn’t have taken it for a flock of birds, as opposed to, say, a snow-covered ice floe or small island. I steal a glance through a student’s spotting scope and can now make out the individual birds. They are drifting in unison on some slow lake current, and seeing such a large mass moving on the water puts me in mind of a huge ship sliding by.
A flock from another pond takes off first, too far away for us to hear or see them very well, black specks spread across a third of the visible horizon. This is anti-climactic, and I begin to wonder if the day’s events will really be as thrilling as promised for a non-birder like myself.
Then something starts to happen on Pond 6. The individual honks and squawks give way to a rising hum, exultant-sounding and gathering in intensity like a helicopter turbine winding up before lift-off. Suddenly the white mass out on the lake catapults into the air, thousands of black-tipped wings strobing against thousands of white bodies under a glowing pink sky. The birds are positively roaring as they pass overhead, unearthly cries that sound as if torn from them, the way roller-coaster passengers cannot help but yell as they begin a steep plunge. As I watch and listen, I feel a chill that has nothing to do with the weather, and I am reminded of Annie Dillard’s account of watching a spectacular eclipse from a California hillside, when she noticed that some of the people around her were actually screaming, apparently unconsciously, in response. I don’t quite feel the urge to scream as wave after wave of geese surges past, but this spectacle seems to me to belong in the same category as what Dillard witnessed, what I like to think of as “glimpses behind the cosmic curtain,” when a sudden shift in scale or perception makes it just that much harder to believe the universe cares in the slightest that you happen to exist.
We watch the birds until they turn to black specks against the clouds, then follow them to their breakfast spot, the stubbly barley fields up on the bench, wending our way to first one flock and then another. An hour and a half of rumbling across rough gravel roads, with no quarter given to my poor Corolla, the only non-SUV in the group. At each stop, the students and the professors huddle once again behind their thicket of tripods, peering into scopes and snapping photos through lenses the length of rolled-up newspapers.
Schwitters makes the rounds, answering questions, never seeming to mind either the cold or having to repeat the same explanations over and over as he works his way down the line of eager watchers. The birds mate when they are three, he tells us, and, yes, it’s for life. When the birds arrive at Freezeout Lake, they have just flown 18 hours non-stop from California. When they leave, they’ll fly for about six hours to the prairie potholes of Saskatchewan. The bigger birds are snow geese; their faces are stained orange by the oxides in the mud where they dig for food with their powerful bills. About ten percent of the flock are Ross’s geese, slightly smaller than the snow geese and, since they are only able to graze on above-ground plants with their comparatively dainty bills, pristine white. Out of 100 white geese, only 1 will still be alive ten years later — a seventy-percent annual survival rate — which is not at all the same thing as saying that these birds are struggling at the population level.
“Today there are more white geese in the world than there ever have been, because we are screwing up the ecosystem,” Schwitters explains at one point. “These birds have adapted wonderfully to human crops.”
In other words, the massive numbers of geese that stop over at Freezeout Lake each March is something of an artificial phenomenon, and a recent one at that. Though Freezeout Lake has always had more than its share of geese at this time of year, Schwitters says that the stopover numbers reached their current magnitude only in the last decade or so.
Professor Greene lays out breakfast fixings, using a camp stove and two French presses to brew coffee right on the gravel road, and before long the geese aren’t the only ones feeling the call of basic biological urges. Plus the motel checkout time is looming. The convoy heads back to town, arranging to meet Schwitters by Freezeout Lake between 10 and 11 for the birds’ return to the water.
By the time we are lakeside again, the temperature has warmed a few degrees but a stiff breeze is whipping off of the water. Again the students erect their tripods, and a professor pulls out some field guides to aid the identification of the various ducks and other birds that are visible in addition to the geese trickling back from the barley fields.
The geese return to the lake much more sporadically than they left it, small groups followed by large followed by small again. Where the takeoff was all about the group, landing is a more individual matter. Some geese circle gradually lower and lower, while others wheel, twist and even invert themselves entirely to dump lift and decrease altitude, with all the reckless agility of fighter jets. When they land, each bird heads for the middle of the group already in the water; no one seems to want to be on the fringes.
After three quarters of an hour, the cold is taking its toll on those of us not naturally blessed with coats of down. There is talk of packing it in for the day when one student, scanning the horizon above the barley fields with binoculars, utters a quiet exclamation of awe.
“Here come a bunch of them,” she says.
This is the largest group yet, by far. They come gradually into view against the gray sky, first as blurry, curved lines like the marks made by a pencil swept back and forth against a piece of paper, then as individual black dots. As the leading edge reaches us and passes overhead, more and more of them appear in the distance, until the sky is absolutely full of them. They fly in wavey V and W formations, the tails now trailing back into sharp chevrons, now rushing forward so that a line of the birds are flying abreast. The formations drift in and out of each other, linking and unlinking, all of them undulating across the sky like a piece of cobweb borne on a breeze.
“Ten thousand?” someone asks Mike.
“Maybe not quite that many,” he answers. “Maybe close to that, though.”
We stand and watch until the sky begins to clear again. Then someone spots a few birds that aren’t landing in the water. They have had their fill of barley, and of Freezeout Lake.
They are headed north.
If you want to check out the Freezeout Lake geese before they all head north, Michael Schwitters thinks you have about another week to do it. If it stays as cold as it has been recently, the geese will tend to hang around longer, which will cause their numbers to build up with each new arriving flock, so the show might get even more spectacular than it was on Thursday. If it warms up, they will clear out fast, though, so check weather forecasts. To locate Freezeout Lake on a map and get directions, click here.
For more like this, read the rest of the Missoula Notebook.
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