The birds of quarantine

During Montana’s coronavirus shutdown, which lasted from mid-March to early May, we kept our sanity by watching the snow geese migration.

Thousands of snow geese were here for about a month, and they would fly from Lake Frances over our house to the farm fields and back again many times throughout the day. They stopped here on a 3,000 mile migration from Mexico and the southern U.S. to fly to the Arctic Tundra to breed this summer.

In comparison to Canadian geese, they are smaller, more nimble, and incredibly fast in the air. They are absolutely beautiful to watch, and as they rose from the lake they rose together so that they blocked the sky from view. It was such a contrast to life in quarantine, stuck mostly at home and inside, to see these birds express such incredible freedom and movement in the air.