25/02/2026
This past weekend I pointed my compass north and followed it to Loess Bluffs National Wildlife Refuge for the very first time.
Long before I reached the entrance, the sky started giving directions. Flocks of geese wheeled overhead like living arrows, guiding me in from miles away. I thought that was impressive. I was wrong.
Nothing prepared me for the shoreline.
The water was not water anymore. It was feathers. An ocean of white stretching so far it felt tidal. According to the latest waterfowl survey, more than 750,000 snow geese were counted that day. Seven hundred fifty thousand. A number so large it stops being math and starts being weather.
At one point a section of geese near where I stood suddenly lifted off. The air detonated into wingbeats and wild, echoing calls. It was thunder made of feathers, a rolling percussion that you felt in your chest. For a moment, the world was nothing but motion and sound.
Miraculously, my car escaped with only a couple of souvenir splatters. A statistical victory.
And just when I thought the day had spent all its drama, sunset delivered an encore. Thousands of birds, either European starlings or red-winged blackbirds, poured across the sky in a murmuration, folding and unfolding in liquid shapes. They rippled and swirled like a celestial current, dancing across the fading light the way the aurora paints the northern sky.
It was one of those days when nature does not whisper. It performs. šļøš
