Snow Geese

Wintering in Tucson 4000 miles from home

Each winter we may have a few Snow Geese show up in Tucson. They are never here in large numbers, but there are often a few around town. At Danny Lopez Park there has been one Snow Goose present during each of the last few winters. When I was at the park in January while looking at the Bald Eagle, the Snow Goose was busy preening along the shoreline. It didn’t seem to care at all that there was a large bird of prey in the eucalyptus tree just forty yards away.

Balancing easily on one leg, the Snow Goose continued to make sure each one of its feathers was in good condition. There was a domestic Goose at the lake also and it seemed as if these two birds liked to hang around together

It is always amazing to me to understand how far these Snow Geese travel during their fall migration. Looking at the range map below, provided by the AllAboutBirds site, you can see the Snow Geese breeding/summer grounds colored in orange. Yellow marks the migration routes, and in general Snow Geese head due south from wherever they summer. That means the Snow Goose at this park had to travel 4000 miles from the north slopes of Alaska or from the northern border of Canada along the Arctic Circle. That’s a long way to go just to be eating the grass at a local park in Tucson.

I came across another Snow Goose at the Sewailo Golf Course on the southwest side of town near the Casino del Sol. For whatever reason, that site also has had a Snow Goose almost every year for the past few years. Sometimes there have been two Geese wintering there.

I saw what was probably the exact same bird almost one year ago to the day. Here is the link to my newsletter from December 2024. At that time, one year ago, this Snow Goose was a first year bird. It still had many gray feathers. This year, at the age of 1 1/2, it has come into its full adult plumage and is a snowy white which is set off by the black feathers on its wings.

Although there are just a very few wintering Snow Geese in Tucson annually, in Arizona you can find a number of Snow Geese every year in the Wilcox area at Whitewater Draw. Sometimes there are a few hundred Snow Geese there. If you’d like to see 10,000 or perhaps 40,000 Snow Geese, travel to the nearby Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico. That entire site along the Rio Grande has an incredible number of Sandhill Cranes and Snow Geese. It is well worth the drive.