600!

I went birding today for the first time since the goose chase of last Monday. Guess what I did? Yep...chased some geese. Dom and I went back to Truro this morning to try for the geese we missed a week ago. We spent almost 3 hours searching through fields of geese (there are really only 5 fields the geese hang out in) with no luck. Damn! As we were going to grab lunch I noticed a flock of geese on the Salmon River, just before the turn-off to all the food places, so we decided to stop and check it out. After about 10 seconds of scanning I found the Barnacle Goose! My first thought was "How cool would it be if the Pink-footed was in this flock too?" I then told Dom I had the Barnacle and scanned about 50 feet further only to find the Pink-footed! Sa-weeeeet! We spent a while watching them swim around with a few hundred Canadas, noting all the differences for future finding chances! After a while they swam around the bend in the river and out of sight, so we decided to grab lunch. On our way back to Wolfville we made a few stops, ending up in Grand Pre looking for Short-eared Owls, where we eventually found one after wandering the dykes for an hour waiting for sunset.

Both of the rare geese are in this (phone-scoped) photo - can you find them?

All in all a successful day! I bet you are wondering about the title of the post at this point. The Pink-footed Goose was a lifer for me and just happened to be the 600th species I've seen in the ABA area (Canada and mainland USA)!!! The Barnacle Goose was only an ABA lifer (#599) as I saw a few of them in England in 2004. I also added Ruffed Grouse to my Nova Scotia list but that hardly compares with the others mentioned here!