It is 8:00 on a dreary winter morning, and I am slogging across the salt marsh trying to keep up with John Roser as we set out in search of brant geese. He’s wearing hip waders and carrying a scope, mounted on a tripod. He’ll use it to read the characters on the colored leg bands that some of the geese wear. I am skeptical.

“The geese are banded with nine different colors, based on where they came from,” Roser tells me. Yellow, for example, identifies birds banded in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in western Alaska. Fishing in a pocket of his jacket, he pulls out a cylindrical piece of bright yellow plastic, about an inch long, with large black lettering.

The full text of this article is in the Winter issue of Coast & Ocean magazine. To subscribe to Coast & Ocean, click here. Subscribe