Birthday, Birthday, You've Had a Birthday

We recently celebrated Jeremy's birthday.  Besides cake and ice cream, Jeremy had a special request.  He wanted us to go to the annual Snow Goose Festival in Delta.  We weren't able to make it last year, but we were this year, and it was right around his birthday.
It was cold.  I forgot to bring or remind kids to bring gloves.  Whoops.  Luckily, they had a tent set up with a little heater.  Jr. enjoyed getting snow all over his boots then watching the steam come off them near the heater.  Sigh.
We got to the reservoir early enough that there was only one lone snow goose floating around.

The rest hadn't come in from where they were having their breakfast in nearby fields.  We didn't know where those nearby fields were so we didn't get to see them in the fields.  I took some of the kids to the van to warm up while Jeremy and Jr. waited for the geese to come flying in.  It wasn't long.  Jeremy was able to wave to me when a big group of geese were on their way so I was able to get out of the van and watch them circle and light on the water.  It was so fun.  There were sooooo many geese.

There were spotting scopes set up so we were able to get better looks than with our binoculars.

Lucky had trouble figuring out how to look with just one eye in the scope (he's used to binoculars), so one of the people brought out his phone with an attachment for the scope and Lucky could look at the screen and see the geese.  So nice.
It was cool.  We went for a drive around lunchtime to a different place.  That was fun.  We saw some birds we hadn't yet seen this year.  After we were done with that area we went back to the Snow Goose Festival.  The geese floated closer to where we were so we could get a better look at them.  Again, it was awesome.

I wanted to get a picture of the kids with the reservoir and geese in the background.  They were so good to oblige.

Jeremy got a panorama of the reservoir in the morning without the geese and in the afternoon with the geese all stretched out in a big line.  That was fun.

There were other activities going on during the festival, but we missed some.  Oh, well.  We enjoyed what we did do.  Jeremy was very happy with this for a birthday present.