While I love this blog, I now pretty much only write on my other two blogs: BirdingBlogs.com and 10,000 Birds - I would love to see you there!

Saturday 5 December 2009

24000 Wild Geese!

24,000 wild geese
10,000 people

The Tatai Vadlud Sokadalom (Tata Wild Goose Festival) last weekend was - as expected - simply incredible.

The geese sleep overnight on the large "old lake" (Öreg Tó), surrounded by the Hungarian city of Tata. During the day, they feed out on agricultural fields up to 50km away from the lake, returning at dusk again. Binoculars and telescopes really help enhance the experience:




view over the lake, with large flocks of geese coming in

digiscoping the geese across the lake (see the previous photo)


I also took a fair amount of video footage and did an interview with one of the organisers. I'll post it when I have it done. I am really loving video and videoscoping (as you may well have guessed), it just takes so much time to edit and prepare the video files...

Some of the geese species involved were:
Taiga Bean Goose (>10,000)
White-fronted Goose (>10,000)
Greylag Goose (>1500)

And a few each of:
Redbreasted Goose
Brent Goose

Join us next year in Hungary for the 10th Tatai Vadlud Sokadalom!

Happy birding
Dale



3 comments:

Chris said...

24,0000 geese and 10,000 people, that was surely something very very impressing! I've never seen so many geese in only one observation! That's incredible. So I guess they were several species there???
Beautiful scenery shots you got!

Dale Forbes said...

it was truly impressive.
I updated the post to include a little bit of info on the goose species involved.
happy birding,
Dale

FAB said...

Fantastic location Dale and a truely magical experience I'm sure but still no Pink-foots!
BTW I've just posted "The Evening Flight" to keep you going until the next time. Cheers FAB.