Tag Archives: geese

December Geese

December Geese
Migratory geese flock in Central Valley pastures on a foggy morning.

December Geese. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Migratory geese flock in Central Valley pastures on a foggy morning.

The experience of photographing winter’s migratory birds in California might be divided into several sorts of exercise. One is looking for the birds, often without finding them or perhaps spotting them too far away to photograph. Then there is the experience, after not finding them, of waiting for their hoped-for arrival, perhaps spending time doings something else entirely. When they do show up we then watch, often making a few hopeful initial photographs as they do the same things we’ve photographed before.

Sometimes we manage to get very close — occasionally because the geese, by some miracle, come to us, rather than due to our skills are finding them. The geese have work to do, and they seem almost oblivious to our presence as they feed. The flocks often move slowly across the landscape, producing a remarkable low, droning sound. If you have watched them long enough you know that eventually they will move, sometimes by leaving in groups that follow one after another, but sometimes in a sudden and virtually unpredictable eruption of flight that produces first a sort of “ripping” sound as thousands of pairs of wings flap and the flock becomes airborne.


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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Thinning Tule Fog, Morning

Thinning Tule Fog, Morning
Autumn trees begin to emerge from thinning morning tule fog, Central Valley.

Thinning Tule Fog, Morning. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Autumn trees begin to emerge from thinning morning tule fog, Central Valley.

As I post this photograph and text it is mid-September, although the post is being queued up for the first day of October. Most of you will see it on October 1. (If you see it earlier, use your imagination!) The onset of autumn in my part of California always seems to take longer than I expect, even after decades of experiencing it. For many years I subconsciously felt that it began when school started again “in the fall,” even though the start dates usually occurred while it was still late summer. This association with fall led me to expect to see fall weather in September, but September in most of California feels much more like summer. I still struggle with this seasonal displacement.

But if you are seeing this on October 1, it now actually is fall, and even though we typically have some warm days ahead of us — and usually the real rains are at least a month away — the change is now becoming more obvious. The nights last longer than the days, mornings are cool, the clouds from incoming Pacific systems start to pass overhead, and the aspens are turning in the Sierra Nevada. This is my favorite season — the time of soft light and clouds and autumn colors. This photograph comes from a late-autumn day in California’s Central Valley, as morning tule fog began to thin. (Note: This is a reworking of an image posted previously.)


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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Landing in Fog

Landing in Fog
Geese land in morning tule fog, California Central Valley.

Landing in Fog. © Copyright 20202012G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Geese land in morning tule fog, California Central Valley.

Back when I first began photographing this subject, I tended to think of these conditions as being barely worthy of photographing. Challenges abound — it is hard to stop the motion of flying birds when using a long lens in low light, the thick fog often renders the birds invisible, and it can be cold and wet! But over time my perspective shifted and I came to hope for conditions like these at the start of a day of bird photography.

Finding the birds in these conditions can be something of a challenge. Often I’ll hear them — many thousands of them — somewhere out there in the fog. But the birds are too far away to be visible, aside from an occasional outlier that quickly appears in the mist and is gone just as fast. So we move on, hoping that we’ll eventually find a spot where the birds a close enough or that the fog will eventually thin a bit. On this morning we had traversed almost the entirety of this location before we came upon a huge flock very close to the gravel road. We stopped and watched quietly as the first came and went.


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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Geese in Fog

Geese in Fog
Geese feed in a California Central Valley pasture on a foggy morning.

Geese in Fog. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Geese feed in a California Central Valley pasture on a foggy morning.

As I work my way through the raw file archives from past years — a wonderful exercise in this pandemic-limited times — I don’t just think about the images as photographs. I also recall the experiences of making them — the feelings of the locations, the people who were with me, the surrounding non-photographic activities. During the past few days I’ve been thinking about the overall experience of a full day of photographing a subject such as these migratory birds, and as I do so I’ve considered how different it is from what many folks might imagine.

When people think of bird photography I believe that they relate to the “hunt” aspect of it — searching for a subject and focusing in on some amazing specimen or specimens. Sounds pretty exciting, right? But the truth about this sort of photography (and, to be honest, lots of photography) is that it tends to involve a lot more “not photographing” than actual photographing. A typical day of photographing a subject like this one involves quite a bit of just being there with my eyes open, hoping I’m in the right place at the right time. It tends to be a slow and quiet activity, punctuated by occasional bouts of intense activity. I’ve been in the field with folks who weren’t used to this, and I can often sense their anxiety of slowing down enough as they wait for something to happen. Over time I have learned to love these slow, quiet periods — like the very quiet scene in this photography. I often think nostalgically about them more than about the brief, intense moments.


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.

Blog | About | Flickr | FacebookEmail

Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

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All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.