Dawn, New Year’s Day 2016. San Joaquin Valley, California. January 1, 2016. © Copyright 2016 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Geese in flight above a rural San Joaquin Valley road at dawn, New Year’s Day 2016
A few years back a group of friends decided to meet at dawn on New Year’s Day. We arrived at a place out in the San Joaquin Valley that is mostly populated by migratory birds this time of year, and we greeted the first sunrise of the new year with friends — a few human friends and a few tens of thousands of geese and other birds. We repeated the event the following year, and it has now become a traditions. Today we can’t think of a better way to start a new year, and once again we assembled there on New Year’s Day 2016.
We arrived to find the place strangely quiet. Typically we expect to hear thousands of birds all around us, but we figured out that they had moved off to nearby ponds. A few of us headed that way and eventually others followed, and we found a decent group of geese settled in on the shallow water. As the sun rose thousands more geese began to fly in, and before long the ponds were filled with them. Inevitably, something causes them to suddenly take to the air and before long that is exactly what happened. The flock noisily took flight, made a few loops over the pond, and then headed north over the rural roadway, silhouetted against sunrise sky.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
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