Two local birders, Fisher Stephenson and Michelle Day, were stunned to spot one of North America's rarest birds at Cochrane Lake.
The couple was exploring the area Thursday afternoon when they saw something unusual among a flock of Canadian geese.
“I spotted this little brown goose and at first I dismissed it as a goose called a greater white-fronted goose,” says Stephenson. “Then I was looking at a bit more and I thought it looked a little bit too big and the bill was a little bit off. I had a feeling, so I looked up a bean goose on my phone and the picture matched exactly.”
“I started panicking a little bit and I was like Michelle, don't freak out but we just found one of the rarest birds in North America.”
Turns out the pair was looking at a tundra bean goose. Normally, the bird calls Europe and Asia home and has only been seen once in Alberta, back in 2019 and a handful of times in North America.
After sharing photos with a bird enthusiast group, people from around the province started to flock to Cochrane for a chance to see the rare animal.
“There's a lot of birders in Calgary and I know there was a group that came down from Edmonton to see it and Lethbridge,” he says. “I had someone from the Okanogan message me saying that he wanted to come see it, but he wasn't sure if it would still be here after the six-hour drive.”
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“It stuck around for about six hours, I'd say. Probably 30 or 40 people came and saw it, and then it did fly off.”
Stephenson and Day have also submitted their discovery to the Alberta Bird Record Committee at the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton.
