Getting collared by a goose

Geese are one a special group of birds that can divide people's opinion in the same way that city pigeons or urban gulls can. Many assume that geese stay in the same place year after year, especially the ones that are fed in parks and urban areas. No one really knows for sure however and ringing is uniquely set up to be able to find this out.

Canada Geese taken by John Harding

One particular issue people have is that when geese moult during June or July, they drop all their flight feathers simultaneously and become flightless. Due to the fear of predation they remain very close to bodies of water for the month or so while they regrow their feathers. Geese can cause serious habitat degradation in certain locations like the reed beds at Hickling Board, Norfolk (.pdf) and understanding more about the reasons behind this can improve the situation for geese and people.

On our BTO Nunnery Lakes reserve, Thetford, Norfolk we have several fishing lakes and the geese usually choose the lake that has fencing around it. The downside of this decision is that the geese quickly eat all the accessible food and they have to be moved out onto another lake. During this process the geese are ringed, and in 2012 our ringers started to add uniquely coded plastic neck collars to Greylag and Canada Geese as part of the Hickling Broad project.

Canada Goose AEL - taken by Neil Calbrade

Neck collars are a safe marking method for large geese and have been used widely in previous studies on species such as the migratory Pink-footed Goose and White-fronted Goose, allowing individuals to be identified when on water as well as on land. This is particularly important if you are investigating moulting birds, where seeing their legs are an issue. Due to the size of the goose's head the collars actually have quite a lot of room inside to move around.

Greylag FHA bringing up the next generation - taken by Janet Foster

Since 2012, we have had a fantastic response from BTO staff, volunteers and members of the public who have submitted sightings of any geese with neck collars to www.ring.ac, specifying the species, combination on the colour ring, location (ideally with a grid reference) and the date.

The map below shows the sightings that we received between summer 2012 to summer 2014 away from the reserve itself. As you can see they did indeed go into town but also they explored the surrounding waterways and lakes.




What is amazing however, is after the summer of 2014 the geese were spotted much further away from the BTO reserve, see map below. The reason for this are under investigation and some individuals regularly return to the BTO after making these 'unusual' movements. Being able to identify each individual on the water should help us answer some interesting questions like 'do geese moult in the same place every year', 'do they winter in the same locations' and 'why do they move'.




If you do see a neck collared goose, please report it via www.ring.ac and you will receive information on the movements of that particular goose and at the same time increase our understanding of these birds.

An exceptional Canadian goose

It's not every day we receive a report of a BTO-ringed bird in Canada, so when we recently received details of a goose shot in Quebec, interest was piqued. 1390992 was also carrying a neck collar and darvic ring (X2A) when shot in October 2012 at Gaspesie.

The bird, a Greenland White-fronted Goose, was originally ringed in Wexford, Ireland, in March 2012 and is only the second recovery of the species in the Americas. The first (colour-ringed 8MF)was also from Wexford, resighted in winter 1990/91 in Pennsylvania before returning to Wexford in subsequent winters. These two birds are also the only records of ringed Greenland White-fronted Geese in North America since the work of Finn Salomonsen in the 1940s and 1950s.


View Canadian goose in a larger map

Recoveies of Greenland White-fronted Geese are more likely to come from Iceland and, not surprisingly, Greenland - see the online ringing report for further details.

Tony Fox continues the story:

The Greenland race of Greater White-fronted Goose was considered very rare in the Eastern United States before 1980, with the few records of any Greater White-fronted Geese coming from Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York (mostly Long Island) and Connecticut. Interestingly, recent ringing of Canada Geese in west Greenland using yellow collars has shown these states to be the winter quarters for these geese which share the summer breeding areas with Greenland White-fronted Geese that normally winter exclusively in Ireland and Britain. Greater White-fronted Geese were also surprisingly rare in the Atlantic Provinces of Canada.

However, in recent years, numbers have increased and since around 1995, the species has been reported annually from Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, as well as the coastal states of eastern USA. It is really difficult to judge if this is just the result of more observers, better equipped with better optics and improved knowledge, or due to a genuine increase in these geese occurring in the region, but certainly between 1979 and 2004 there were some 73 reports of Greenland White-fronted Geese in North American Birds and the frequency of reporting has likely increased since that time. It seems likely that Greenland White-fronted Geese have always wandered down into North America, since there were ringing recoveries of individuals marked in west Greenland recovered in Quebec 12 October 1946, the Magdalene Islands, Quebec 1 October 1959 and in New Brunswick 22 October 1966, despite the relatively low numbers of individuals marked in the population during this period.

Since 1979, over 2600 Greenland White-fronted Geese have been marked in Ireland, Britain, Iceland and Greenland, yet only one has ever been resighted in North America: 8MF was ringed at Wexford in SE Ireland in winter 1989/90 but wintered in Pennsylvania in 1990/91 but returned to winter at Wexford in 1991/92 and 1992/93. The recovery of X2A, ringed at Wexford in winter 2011/12, from Gaspesie on the Quebec southern shore of the opening to the St Lawrence Seaway is thus an exciting yet rare record of the subspecies from the New World. Given that the population of the Greenland White-fronted Goose has increased rapidly during the 1980s and early 1990s before dropping back to mid 1980s populations levels in recent years, its seems likely that the subspecies remains a rather rare vagrant to the Canadian Atlantic Provinces and the coastal states of the US, probably individuals caught up with flocks of the Canada Geese that breed in west Greenland and that winter in this very area."

'Ganso' Goose goes down

After just doing a blog story on neck collared Greylag Geese another amazing story pops up. We have just heard from Derek Faulkner concerning the second ever Spanish ringed Greylag Goose to reach our shores.

Greylag Goose 1003016, also known as neck collar 'Black 07T' met with a wildfowler on 9th Feb at Shellness on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent after being ringed as an adult on 7th Jan 1999 at Reserva Biologica de Donana, Huelva (1711km in 4416 days).


View Spanish ringed Greylag in a larger map

Its always good to know that some Greylag Geese are truely wild as these birds can be very easily overlooked on any birding trip. Tim Ball adds "the migration atlas makes no mention of southern wintering Greylag Geese migrating through the UK - my guess is that this bird was wintering much further north than it used to (and as a species)- obviously a single dated record doesn't mean it spent all winter in the UK but it wouldn't be the normal migration track for birds between Spain and NE Europe otherwise there would surely have been other recoveries."

Thanks to David Falkner for letting us know and Tim Ball and Rod Smith for their input.

Collars galore

Nick Moran (the BirdTrack Organiser here at the BTO) has been out an about recently recording neck-collared wildfowl. NB: All records of neck-collared birds can be reported online at www.ring.ac

First up was this Bewick's Swan Nick photographed near Little Ouse, Cambs, on 30 January. We're not sure where this bird was ringed, but do know it has previously been seen in The Netherlands (in Flevoland on 17/12/2008) and Germany (11-29/3/2009). Histories of other neck-collared swans can be found here.


Just this last weekend (21 February) Nick noted a couple of neck-collared Pink-footed Geese near Lackford, Suffolk. These birds weren't the usual silver-collared birds (from the Icelandic population) but had blue collars.


Both of these birds (H7K and I3R) were ringed on 30 March 2005 in Denmark. Since being ringed these birds have commuted between Norway, Denmark and The Netherlands in subsequent winters, and a full list of sightings (59 and 76 sightings so far for the two birds) can be found here.

Remarkably, we have fewer than 10 records of birds from this population (three from Denmark and six from The Netherlands), which breed on Spitsbergen and winter on the Continent. Interestingly, this flock of Pink-feet also contained an obliging Tundra Bean Goose.


Thanks to Nick for letting us know about these birds and for the photos.