What's that noise!

For several days, Mum, Gracie and I have been hearing birds out on our walks....types of birds we haven't heard since we've been here.

For a couple of days we would go in the direction of the noise to see if we could find and identify them. They would always sound like they were just over the bend, or over the hill. So close! We just had to know what they were. Pheasant? Grouse? Quail?

Mum would hear them, stop us and say 'listen.' That's when Gracie and I stand very still and quiet and look around to see what's up.

We've done the 'listen' on our hikes so much now that it's second nature to us, didn't even need treats to train us to stay that still and quiet, BOL!

Well, the next day Mum heard the birds again and this time she looked up, way up! And we finally found out what they were/are!

Geese, hundreds of them, flying south for the winter. Here's a really bad photo Mum got with our BB of them way, way up in the air above us that day! We saw three v's just like this. Guess those Geese won't need any tanning bed lotion where they're going, BOL!

We've heard Geese fly overhead many times before back in Indiana, but these dudes were so far up in the sky on these very still days that we didn't even recognize their usual sounds. Made Mum think of one of her favorite movies 'Winged Migration.'

Then we got to thinking, why do birds fly in a V? Well, seems they are pretty smart, not bird brains at all. The V is designed to reduce drag, hence reducing the energy they expend when flying those long trips south. Here's a great blog post we found talking all about it, very interesting!

EDIT: My friend Ricky thinks they were Sandhill Cranes flying overhead, not Geese. We did a quick Internet search and found this article from one of our favorite identifying sites - Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Yep, that's the sound! Thanks Ricky!