My name is Fier, and my question is how do geese know when it is time to migrate?
Alicia King is with the US Fish And Wildlife Service Migratory Bird Program.
"Geese, in particular, usually get their cues from the amount of daylight hours and they will migrate depending on the length of day and sometimes depending on the weather conditions."
"If you take for example a Canada goose, some of those geese are actually non-migratory so they will stay in an area as long as they have an open water and food in the winter time. They might not migrated all. But then there are other geese that do migrate and they tend to be you know the more wild ones."
Alicia says geese learn to migrate from their parents and they only fly in the daytime. "That's why you can see them in the daytime. They fly not too awfully high, but pretty high so you can see it in varying levels in the sky. They travel probably 15 to 20 mph as they're flying."
'Geese are fun to watch and you probably see them forming a v formation up in the sky. They have a lead and it makes it a little easier for the geese following behind to kind of get that up draft of the wings of the lead goose. Then the lead goose will fall back to the back to take a little bit of a rest and another goose will move forward."
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