A Day For the Birds!

Cibola National Wildlife Refuge is located in Arizona, but you have to go to California to get there from here! It's located south of here along the Colorado River -- actually where the river ran many years ago. Much of the refuge -- about a thousand acres -- is farmland, it's leased out to farmers, who must then leave a good portion of their crops for birds. There has been a great deal of reclamation work done over the past forty years. The salt cedars (the nasty invasive tree introduced by settlers for its decorative value and fast growth) are being taken out and native plants like mesquite, willows and cottonwoods planted instead.

The offices and Visitor Center overlook some of the fields -- you can see thousands and thousands of geese from the overlook trail behind the building --

Along with the thousands of Snow and Canadian geese, there are also hundreds of ducks. This Northern Shoveler is beginning to show his spring breeding colors --

The other bird we saw lots of were Say's Pheobes, they were everywhere!

These are some of the many thousands of Snow geese that we saw both on the ground feeding and flying --

There's a four mile auto tour around a portion of the refuge. It takes you through some of the farmland (mostly planted to alfalfa) and some of the areas replanted to wildlife habitat. We drove by thousands of Canadian geese. The ones at this refuge are mostly the Great Basin subspecies which is the largest of the Canada geese. They stand 2 feet tall and weigh up to 10 pounds. When we first saw them from a distance with their long necks, we thought they might be cranes. The dark grey Canadians would be clustered together in one portion of a field while the white snow geese were be together in another part. They took off and flew in their own distinct groups as well.