February 22, 2026.
I set an alarm for 6:30 am so we could get to the refuge for sunrise. We’d camped just 10 minutes away. While sunrise in the dead of winter in Missouri isn’t appealing to most, it is the best time to catch the spectacle of the snow geese at the Loess Bluffs National Wildlife Refuge. (loess rhymes with bus)
We’ve seen some pretty epic bird displays on our drives across North America. The first, and most notable bird stop was the one we made for the sandhill cranes in Arizona. This took our breath away. Over 20,000 giant birds making dinosaur-like sounds, erupting from a picturesque wetland at dawn? I’d never seen anything like it. But even that experience did not prepare me for what we were about to see.
The wildlife refuge puts out a weekly bird report that you can download from their website, so I’d been checking the latest updates. Just a few days ago they estimated there were about 190,000 snow geese at the refuge. ONE HUNDRED AND NINETY THOUSAND.
That’s nearly ten times as many birds as we saw in our epic spot in Arizona.
When we arrived, there was another car in the parking lot with an out of state plate. Bird people are something else. They’ll travel hundreds, if not thousands of miles to sleep in their car in subzero temperatures just to be the first on scene to photograph the birds. She was already out there with her huge mittens and huge-r lens to capture the snow goose flock.
I quickly filled some mugs with hot drinks and we got out of the van to see the birds. We’d frightened a small pack of snow gees as we drove up in the van, leaving just a few trumpeter swans on the frozen lake. Some sat with their long neck twisted against their bodies, heads tucked under their wings. Others sat on muskrat lodges that also serve as swan nesting sites. These birds are incredible to see. Trumpeter swans are the heaviest living birds in North America, weighing up to 30 pounds! They can have a wingspan of up to ten feet. These swans were nearly extirpated from the United States in the early 1900’s, but they now have a healthy and stable population across the continent.
It was 15 degrees outside and quite windy. In the distance, we could see the V-shaped flying formations of birds nearby. But we also noticed what looked like great clouds of smoke rising from the distant wetlands. Soon, we realized that was made up of many thousands of birds in flight. We hopped back in the van to drive closer to the “smoke” in the sky.
As we moved from one parking lot to the next, we got closer and closer to the huge mass of birds. There, we experienced the snow geese in a grand aggregation. We could hear their cacophony in the air, so many birds calling at once! Among the chaos, we looked around for other birds: pintails, mallards, greater white-fronted geese, mergansers. Probably some hooded mergansers, northern shovelers and others. It was a bit overwhelming.
Snow geese use this and other National Wildlife Refuges in the Midwest as wintering grounds. During the spring, they migrate north to breed in the Arctic. It is an important “feeding and breeding” area for several other species of waterfowl and other birds, too. Any time of year you visit, you’re likely to see something interesting.
By 9 am we were getting pretty hungry, so we made breakfast in one of the parking lots. A bald eagle sat in a tree nearby, perhaps searching for its own breakfast.
Though I only logged 11 species of birds that day, it was easily the most “birdy” day I’ve ever had. And for future planning, when I looked up the statistics for the two weeks after my visit, the snow goose count shot up to 750,000 birds. If you want to get the most bang for your buck, plan a visit during the first week of March! And bring a warm jacket. Still not convinced? Check out this video I took that morning.