Tangled in Traffic

[Chris Hansen]

I was going over my images from earlier this week and i noticed one of the White fronted Geese looked a little odd. After looking more closely I realized that two of the geese were flying rather close together on takeoff. Look at the body posture of the middle goose. It is putting the breaks on trying to get out from under the other gooses wing.

Chris

[John Chardine]

Hi Chris- I had some thoughts on your image but waited to see if others had them as well.

I think the behaviour you captured is probably pretty common but we often overlook it. Photography then comes to the rescue and captures something like this that we missed. It is remarkable that more collisions in flocking situations like don't seem to occur (or we miss them) and one reason they may not is that birds are continually reacting so as to avoid collision. This must be happening several times a second in a large flock of wheeling shorebirds.