St. Albert and Sturgeon County bird fans will flock to Tofield next week for the first Snow Goose Festival in over 20 years.
Thousands of Alberta bird watchers will board buses to Tofield this April 22 and 23 for the 2023 Snow Goose Festival. This once-annual celebration of migratory birds — which draws many bird fans from St. Albert — is making its triumphant return after a 21-year absence.
The Snow Goose Festival was one of the most popular events of its kind when it launched back in 1993, with up to 6,000 people in attendance, said organizer Geoff Holroyd. But drought caused Beaverhill Lake to nearly vanish in 2002, and with it went the festival’s birds, volunteers, and sponsors. The event was put on indefinite hold. The Edmonton Nature Club started a Snow Goose Chase Tour around Tofield the next year, but those tours stopped in 2018.
When water and birds returned to Beaverhill Lake in 2019, Holroyd said he and other area naturalists pitched a comeback for the festival to Tofield officials to bolster conservation efforts.
“We’re not going to save the planet if people don’t appreciate wildlife in the wild areas that are out there,” he said.
Holroyd said the group originally planned to restart the festival in April 2020, but had to delay it until this year due to the pandemic.
This year’s festival will see guests go on guided hikes and bus tours of the Tofield area and Beaverhill Lake to spot migratory birds, Holroyd said. There will also be free talks on birds at the Tofield Arena. The stars of the festival will be the snow geese, many of which will gather in flocks of up to 10,000 birds.
It’s a spectacular sight, said St. Albert birder Percy Zalasky, who often checks out the snow goose migration around Tofield.
“To see a whole field white like snow and to have 10,000 snow geese rise up in the air calling and heading north, that’s a very unique experience.”
Flying snowfields
Snow geese sometimes show up at Big Lake, but you won’t find huge mobs of them unless you head east to Tofield, Zalasky said. Look for an all-white goose with black wingtips surrounded by hundreds just like it.
Alberta’s snow geese will have spent the winter in California and Texas, where a recent switch to rice from corn crops has caused their numbers to explode. Nearly 10 million of them are now headed north, with Beaverhill Lake catching the western edge of the wave.
The snow geese in Alberta are actually Lesser snow geese, said Garnet Raven, a wildlife biologist with the Canadian Wildlife Service and a speaker at next week’s festival — eastern Canadians get Greater snow geese, which are about twice as big. About five per cent of snow geese will be of the “blue” morph, which are grey/black on most of their bodies and white on their heads.
Raven said snow geese use Beaverhill Lake as a stopover point on their way to their northern breeding grounds. Holroyd said most will head to Alaska or the central Arctic, but some will end up on Wrangel Island near Siberia.
Holroyd asked festival guests to purchase their tour tickets in advance to ensure the tour buses were full. Guests can get to their tour buses by driving to the Tofield Arena or taking the free shuttle bus from the Bethel Transit Terminal in Sherwood Park.
Holroyd encouraged guests to come out and see the joy of spring.
“It’s something else to come out to the countryside and see a flock of thousands of geese migrating north,” he said.
Visit tofieldalberta.ca/events/snow-goose-festival for details.
