I was relieved when I heard his happily excited voice..."Grab your camera and come down here! A big flock of snow geese is in the field!"

Out for his daily walk, he'd spotted a flock of hundreds of geese coming in for a landing in a cornfield just down the road for us. He knows his photographer wife well and knew I'd be excited too! So I quickly grabbed my binoculars, camera, longest lens, and tripod and drove a mile down the road to see the phenomenon.

I've seen flocks of snow geese in North Carolina before, but this is the first time I've ever seen them around these parts. Snow geese (which, by the way, mate for life) spend their summers breeding in the northernmost arctic areas of Canada, Greenland, and Siberia, then migrate south for the winter.

The darker colored birds are snow geese as well, just a mutation of the same species and are known as "blue geese."

They like to stop in marshy fallow fields where they can easily dig up roots and tubers to eat. With our recent rains, the fields around here certainly fit that description!

Just so beautiful and a rare sight in central Indiana!

And I couldn't help but be sad thinking about how those big industrial wind turbines that may soon be popping up their ugly profiles across our county landscape would undoubtedly decimate migrating flocks like this one. Or at the very least, make them change their migration routes so we wouldn't be graced with their beauty.

I'm so glad I got to see the snow geese on their brief stop in Henry County.

True snowbirds.