We went to Horicon Marsh in Wisconsin today, not looking for any lifers (not really), but to see the great mass of Canada geese that supposedly congregate there each fall. The geese are supposed to number in the hundreds of thousands, and we wanted to experience the wildness of a sky black with birds that Audubon and others have described. Of course, we didn’t.

Horicon was its usual lonely and quiet (except for the trucks tearing down Route 49) self. It was a cold day, and most of the marsh (except for a few small lone pockets of slushy water) was frozen. There were some Canadas, far out on the marsh, and they did outnumber the other birds we saw, coots, gadwalls, green-winged teals, northern shovelers, along with the ubiquitous mallards, but somehow, there just seemed to be hundreds, not the thousands upon thousands we were expecting. Maybe the missing geese were in the interior of the marsh, not the outskirts that we scoped.

Along the edges of the marsh, we saw small flocks of sandhill cranes, looking very clean and pale gray, and heard their strange, rattling calls that sound like something out of Jurassic Park.

We also saw some stragglers from the summer: a great blue heron, a black-crowned night heron, a red-winged blackbird, and a lone common moorhen sliding on the ice — shouldn’t they all be well on their way south by now? And we spotted another sure sign of the winter to come, dozens of American tree sparrows flitting in the brush.

Best of all, we were finally able to identify a TUNDRA SWAN, a lifer for both of us. It seems that everywhere we go, people have been reintroducing trumpeter swans, and we’ve never seen the more common tundra. We saw a small group of four land on the ice, near dusk. Of course, due to the weather, they were hiding their beaks, but eventually one or another would lift their heads, and after much pondering and consulting of guide books, we decided that finally, after three long years of seeing only trumpeters and mute swans, and trying to identify white blobs that were too far away, we had indeed seen the elusive tundra swan. As Borat would say, “Success!”