lakefront Ross's Goose

After striking out entirely on geese in the Scottdale plains where Rhoda had found a Ross's Goose earlier I did the next best thing and headed for the beach.  I wasn't expecting very much, and indeed there were few birds by the piers given the amount of boat and foot traffic on a 60 degree January day.  I was just finishing my last scan when I picked up a distant Snow-type Goose flying off the lake.  It landed off Jean Klock and I drove up to get better pics.  My camera was giving me trouble and not auto-focusing or stabilizing so I went back to phone-scoping with the scope zoomed in to 60x.

I was pretty surprised to see it also was a Ross's Goose.

 Note the round head, vertical bill base with blue wartiness, and the pale bill tip.  In the above pic shadow gives it the hint of a grin patch which was much more shadow than real.

Here's the bird with the bill not shadowing.

The bird flew after about 10 minutes and headed inland right past me.  This was total spray and pray with the shutter as I tried to manually focus through the bird and hoped a few frames would be sort of in focus.