Golden Week Part 1

The beginning of May over here sees a succession of public holidays collectively known as 'Golden Week'. I asked Sanae about the origins of the term and she told me that back in the day when Gods bestrode the earth two of them - Onigiri, the God of the rice paddy and Umeboshi, the god of consumer electronics - wed on the first day; on the second day, after an exhausting night doing the dance of the two-backed monkey, Umeboshi discovered she was pregnant; and on the third day she gave birth to Irrashimase, the god of department stores. And such was their happiness they called this fertile time 'Golden Week'.
I dunno, maybe it's just me but there seems to be some sort of subtext to Sanae's explanation which I'm just not grasping. According to Wikipedia the more prosaic explanation is that Japanese history has plumped a number of notable days together - Constitution day, the previous Emperor's birthday and May day, with the result that we get all our public holidays coming at once. Which is fine until you discover that the next public holiday isn't until the end of July which makes for a long, unbroken stretch of spring-summer.
Anyway, the first day of Golden Week dawned sunny and blue so the three of us jumped in my car and drove to Tomokomai, a city I had hitherto never associated with the concept of a 'day out'. But hidden away on the northern side of the town is a series of marshlands and small lakes which are the feeding grounds and transit points for all sorts of birds whose names I didn't bother to read. Most of them are white and look like geese so for convenience's sake that's what we will call them. Even the ones that were swans. And sparrows.
Anyway there was a nice walk around the perimeter of the lake and that's where we took ourselves. And as luck would have it, the lake was directly beneath the approach path for planes landing in nearby Chitose airport. So we divided our time between geese spotting and plane spotting, the rare yellow-billed Siberian goose vying with the equally rare 11.35 Korean Airlines Airbus A320 from Incheon for our excited attention.