SIGN OF TIMES: Not a moment too soon, we get a plethora of
spring-time sightings.

The snow drops and crocuses in Mrs. Weis’ yard in Emporium are
out and the Chinese iris are “coming along.” Cardinals are at the
holly bushes.

Lance Begin has six pileated woodpeckers tapping his maple trees
on West Corydon Street.

Skip Riekofsky had a flock of tundra swans fly over his house in
Kushequa at 12:20 p.m. Tuesday and they must have made it to
Bradford by Wednesday when Bob Slike called to tell us a flock of
them were congregating at Tuna Cross Road bridge.

We heard from Skip again on Wednesday who reported seeing more
than 100 red-winged blackbirds in his quaking aspen. They were
females, he said, a bit unusual since the males usually return
first.

A reader who phoned Wednesday morning to report hearing geese
fly over the night before brought to mind a question about these
migrations: Do geese fly day and night and, if so, how do they see
when it’s dark out?

The Roger Tory Peterson Institute in Jamestown, N.Y., had some
quick answers to this and other questions on its website.

First of all, yes, geese can and do fly at night.

The author of the article lived in the Finger Lakes area of New
York state and reported seeing or hearing them in the early spring
in the very early morning hours, just before dawn, arriving from
the south.

“These geese pass overhead and settle in to the lake here after
flying much, if not most, of the night.”

Geese are basically herbivores and prefer to feed on a variety
of succulent plants. They will eat corn and other grains if they
can find them during migration.

How long they stop and how long they feed in a given area would
depend on different factors such as kind of food, quantity of food,
how long they had flown getting there, weather conditions, and wind
direction and velocity. In other words, what one flock of geese
might do at a given place and time could be very different from
another.

Unlike some other migratory birds, geese tend to follow large
geographic contours of mountains, coastlines, and other major
features in their migrations both spring and fall – they often
travel along the coastlines of the Great Lakes.