Summer 2005
The Wild Goose Chase
by T. L. Roe
Dressed in faded jeans and a white Abercombie sweatshirt, I throw on my red cap and toss a few necessities into a big cooler: six bottles of Diet Pepsi, and a pack of peanut butter crackers. It’s three in the morning on Saturday, Feb. 26, 2005. Grumpy and half asleep, I leave Fowler and head east on Highway 50 with the intentions of making the Sunrise Tour at the Third Annual High Plains Snow Goose Festival in Lamar.
Co-hosted by the City of Lamar and the Colorado Division of Wildlife, the weekend-long festival is held during the optimum time for migratory birds: April 30 through May 7. The snow geese that bird watchers come to Prowers County to see are considered the most abundant goose in the world. Wildlife biologists estimate that there are at least 6 million North. Weighing five to six pounds, the big geese spend their winters in southeastern Colorado, New Mexico, northern Mexico, and the Texas panhandle. In late spring, they form enormous flocks and head back to their summer nesting grounds in the Canadian Arctic.
Canadian Snow Geese (photo: U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service)
The sun begins to rise as I enter Las Animas. Three miles down the highway, something catches my eye and I turn my head to the left to see two bald eagles perched in a tree. I make a U-turn and come back, but when I pull up beside the tree, the large birds with snow-white heads and dark brown bodies fly away and leave me cussing for being denied a great photographic experience.
Not sure if I am supposed to go to the Lamar High School or to another destination, I stop at a Loaf-n-Jug where horse-head lighters and bronc-buster hat pins are displayed across the front counter. When I ask where I should go, two friendly women attendants tell me they aren’t sure, but will call the Cow Palace Hotel and ask them. The hotel decides that I should go to the John Martin Reservoir. Getting back in my car, I realize that I must now backtrack twenty miles to the entrance sign that I passed on the way in.
I pull into the welcome center when I get to the reservoir, and go in to ask if there is a charge to drive through. I tell the two clean-cut, male rangers that I am writing an article on the goose festival and need to locate the tour buses. One of them asks me where I am going, and when I reply that I don’t know where I’m going, both rangers burst out laughing and say that since I’m the “Press” I don’t have to pay to get in. But after a fifteen minute drive through the reservoir without seeing a tour bus, a person, or even a bird, I realize that I should have gone to the high school and leave the park knowing that in the welcome center the “dumb blonde” jokes are being circulated with a gusto.
Back in Lamar, I locate the high school and see the “Welcome Bird Watchers” sign; I’m finally where I should be. Inside, I am greeted by Lamar Chamber of Commerce Manager Shana Reed, a petite woman with short, brown hair, who hurriedly tells me that I can catch up with the Sunrise Tour.
“This time go to the Queens State Wildlife Area, north on Highway 287 in Kiowa County,” says Reed, as she crams a map into my hands and pushes me out the door.
Another twenty miles and I reach the 4,426 acre marshland reserve that is home to numerous species of Colorado wildlife. Feeling like I am on an African safari, I take in the beauty of the high plains park while driving another five miles over bumpy, dusty dirt roads until I see the tour buses.
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