I should start this one by thanking Bill Doms for asking me if I'd ever been to Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge via e-mail. I said yes, last year for the ice storm, then decided to take a look at their site and bird counts. To my surprise they were reporting 250,000 snow geese and 266 bald eagles, only a couple days prior. But, that was on the 5th and the count on the 8th had cut the bald eagle numbers in half while maintaining the snow geese numbers. The bad part was I was well aware at how cold it had been recently, like single digit lows and some days with highs in the mid-teens. As soon as the lakes/ponds are all frozen over, the geese would of course get on their way south. I decide to get up the next morning, on the 10th and drive on down. Actually no, I gave it thought and didn't decide to till I actually woke up. Left here around 10 and got there at noon. The whole drive down I kept seeing froze over ponds. I had a small hope it would improve 2 hours south of here, but it really didn't.   I arrive and park next to a boardwalk that goes out into the water some. I could see a fair amount of geese and ducks well out there. I get out and they flew up in the air, which looked pretty cool...but I wasn't ready yet. I walk out on the boardwalk and meet the guy in the above picture there. I don't think I ever got his name, but wound up chatting with him there for a good 3 hours...as we waited for them to take flight again! That's right, they were really content sitting there for 3 hours. The above photo was when they finally got spooked up by the many many eagles lining the trees right by them. Anyway, his stories were interesting to listen to, since he's shot documentaries for most of his adult life by the sounds of it. Heck, he was in Boston the night before, flew into KC, then rented a car and drove up here. I believe he said he's got $90,000 into that setup right there, lol. It's a big, real HD cam. Apparently that 250,000 had mostly took off south the last couple days. I don't know what 250,000 snow geese look like, but this isn't it. 99% of this lake was froze right now. Them and a bunch of mallards only had this tiny area along the north shore opened up still. We were both apparently a day late...sort of.

I've never seen as many bald eagles before in my life. A small line of trees right behind the ducks/geese(right of this shot) had over 30 of them at one time. Then you'd look out on the ice and see a clump of 17 in one spot, and another spot at the same time had 14 together. Then you'd see individual bald eagles scattered about other areas. They were largely content sitting in the trees all day long as we sat there and waited for something more interesting those 3 hours.

Once they became active it was really cool to watch. They will make passes right above the groups of ducks and geese, which scares them out of the water. Apparently they do that to see if any injured ones remain that they can go down and grab...and eat.

Just look at the wingspan on that one way out there. I'm at 400mm on my XSi on most of these. The lighting this day was horrible. Lots of cirrus and just as much mid-level thicker crap. So the wheels started turning on coming down the following day. That and perhaps renting a better lens(funny, one is using a $1400 lens and needs something bigger).

Sunset was nice. The only problem there are the signs that say gate closes automatically at sunset/5pm. I saw no way around that gate. Sun sets at 4:55 this day. So this pretty much put a fork into any kind of twilight ops after sunset. I stayed here and shot this and took off at 4:50.

Perhaps those are the trumpeter swans on the right. I don't know my birds. Well, the following day the cloud cover was worse. So what I did was get caught up on some things, then drove down to Omaha that night and rented a Canon 300mm F2.8 L(non-IS version). This is a big lens. The IS version is a $4100 lens. I also rented a 2x converter with it, so I'd have 600mm for when I came back the following morning on the 12th. Click HERE to go to that next day.