From time to time I've posted on birds that I've been fortunate to see in my little corner of the world. One bird that makes it into eastern Pennsylvania once or twice each winter is a resident of Greenland but which occasionally wanders south in the winter into the Middle Atlantic states.
The bird is called the Barnacle goose and it's perhaps the most handsome of all the geese seen in the United States. Recently, one of these birds turned up in a park about an hour and a half from my home, so, since I had never seen one before, I decided over the weekend to go see this one.
One thing that makes Barnacle geese especially interesting is the manner in which their young are fledged. They're hatched on ledges high up on cliff faces, but their natural milieu lies in the water hundreds of feet below. Watch this video to see the remarkable manner by which they get from the ledge to the water:
That any of them survive is surely one of the wonders of the animal kingdom.