The phrase ‘a wild goose chase’ refers to a search that is completely unsuccessful and a waste of time because the person or thing being searched for does not exist, or is somewhere else. In my latest Bird Blog I explore the chances of finding different species of wild geese in South-east Cornwall, but also draw upon my experience in 2023 in looking for wild geese while visiting family in the USA. That experience was by no means ‘a wild goose chase’!
In recent months I have had several conversations with local people about Looe’s Canada Geese. These have usually revolved around the disappearance of the large flock, sometimes approaching 200 birds, which frequented the Looe river valleys last summer. Do the geese migrate, and if so where to? This question is often coupled with expressions of regret that they have gone; people say that they love to hear them honking as they fly over the town. They seem to be popular!
I usually have to admit that I am not sure where they have gone. Unlike many species of geese you can see in the UK, Canada Geese are not truly migratory birds; they are relatively sedentary. In spring many pairs now nest in Cornwall, often on river banks or salt marsh, including the East Looe River, or at many ponds, most on private land. In the last two summers a pair or two have nested on Looe Island. Numbers on the Looe rivers peak in late summer and the birds form large flocks. It is quite likely that they then move to other locations in Cornwall where large flocks (sometimes over one thousand) congregate, sometimes for the annual moult. These include particularly, Colliford and Siblyback reservoirs and Dozmary Pool on Bodmin Moor, and the Camel, Fal and Tamar estuaries.
The affection that many people in Looe have for their Canada Geese is often not shared – some regard them as a pest. Geese are herbivores and in Looe feed mainly on surrounding fields – grasses, grain and root crops. Farmers may not be enthusiastic!
The geese are often seen on the estuary. They use water largely as a refuge (safety in numbers) though will also graze on aquatic plants.
They are big birds – on average the largest species of goose – and produce large quantities of excrement, which makes them unpopular at ornamental ponds. They are vigilant parents and can be aggressive, especially if their goslings are threatened.
Of course, they are also an introduced species, which sometimes seems to place them in a ‘second-class’ category. The Canada Goose is obviously a North American species, first introduced to Britain in the seventeenth century. During the reign of Charles II, Canadas were included in the royal collection of waterfowl in St James’s Park. By the nineteenth century they were breeding in a semi-tame state at numerous landed estates. There is also evidence of some Canada Geese reaching Britain naturally. British ornithologists were very slow to recognize them as ‘British birds’ – formal admittance didn’t come until 1938. Today birders rarely seem to be particularly excited to see Canadas and are unlikely to travel specially to see them. Nor do their photographs appear frequently on social media.
Last year I was asked another question. Have you seen the white goose? I could answer ‘yes’, but only in the distance among the flock, and I never managed a decent photo. Flocks of geese often contain hybrid birds, and sometimes there are escapees from farmyards or private collections of waterfowl. A white goose might also be a leucistic one. Leucism prevents pigments in the bird’s body from reaching some or all of its feathers. The degree of leucism varies with a bird’s genetic makeup. But most exciting of all, could a white goose be a Snow Goose?! This is another North American species which breeds across the top of that continent from NE Siberia to NW Greenland. Small numbers of Snow Geese are recorded in Britain annually, most of them escaped from captivity and ornamental collections.
By a happy coincidence, last autumn I had an opportunity to see Snow Geese in the wild on their home turf. Christine and I travelled to New Mexico in the SW USA for the first time, to visit our daughter Helen and her husband Robert, who moved there in 2022. In autumn huge numbers of Snow Geese migrate south from their northern breeding grounds in Arctic Canada, and overwinter in the southern USA in the Rio Grande valley or on the plains of Texas and Louisiana close to the Gulf of Mexico, or in northern Mexico. For many their route south takes them through New Mexico, and one of their favourite destinations is the huge Bosque del Apache reserve, which is only a 20-minute drive from Helen and Robert’s house in Socorro!
Much of New Mexico has a desert climate, and the reserve is on flood plains watered by managed irrigation systems connected to the Rio Grande, and is a haven for not only Snow Geese but also many other waterbirds, most notably the Sandhill Cranes, which also fly south in huge numbers from the northern US and Canada. There are in fact two sub-species of Snow Goose, the Lesser and the Greater, and it is the Lesser which travel to, or through, New Mexico. More than 6 million Lesser Snow Geese breed in Arctic Canada. Their migratory journeys may exceed 3000 miles in both directions.
Why do they do undertake these huge journeys down the continent? Principally because in the high Arctic in summer they can find large areas of suitable nesting habitat on the open tundra, relatively free from predators, and 24 hours of daylight in which to feed. These advantages are similar to those experienced by European species of geese which winter in Britain and summer in the Arctic.
Snow Geese are not necessarily all white. They may be ‘White phase’ or ‘Blue phase’, the latter having other colours, brown, grey, silver, mixed in with the white. Both have black wing tips.
We made several visits to the Bosque reserve in October and early November. At first Snow Geese were hard to find. We were also easily distracted by other interesting or unusual birds. One of the first we saw was a Greater Roadrunner, which was hanging about by the roadside.
It is a large ground-dwelling Cuckoo, the state bird of New Mexico, and immortalised by Warner Bros in a series of cartoons for its ability to escape the traps laid by Wile E. Coyote! Some large white birds at the first stretch of open water we saw proved to be American White Pelicans, not Snow Geese.
Wild Turkeys drifted through the riverine woodlands apparently oblivious to the approach of Thanksgiving!
The number of Snow Geese increased on each visit and on the last in the late afternoon the sky was crisscrossed by noisy straggling skeins of geese as they converged on favourite roosting sites.
In the wide, flooded, fields they competed for our attention with the graceful Sandhill Cranes.
Birds were everywhere. And not just birds. Coyotes appeared in the open, quietly skirting flocks of cranes, geese (including some Canadas) and ducks (with some species familiar in Europe – Shoveler, Pintail, Mallard). The Coyotes were looking for feeding opportunities.
Predatory birds, notably Northern Harriers (very similar to our own Hen Harriers, with owl-like rounded faces), also appeared, but we were too early for the arrival of Bald Eagles.
Back home in Cornwall, and with my interest in Snow Geese piqued by the encounters in New Mexico, I searched my shelves for two half-remembered books. I soon located The Snow Geese by William Fiennes, published in 2002. Fiennes describes his own remarkable journey following the migrating Geese, from Houston on the Gulf of Mexico, to Baffin Island in the Arctic, north of Hudson Bay. This epic is brilliantly described, and culminates in a dilemma for Fiennes on the last leg of his journey in the Arctic, where he travels with Inuit hunters, and is faced with eating Snow Goose, the bird he has fallen in love with during his long traverse of the USA and Canada.
The second book was less easily found, and I could remember little about it. Had I even read it? If so, its content was long forgotten. But a few weeks ago, idly scanning my bookshelves, I came across a slender half-hidden volume, a paperback Penguin, which had cost me three shillings and sixpence, and contained two stories by an American writer, Paul Gallico. One of the stories was called The Snow Goose. It had been first published in 1941, and this Penguin edition in 1967. My recollections of it were hazy. So I read it again.
Gallico’s novella is set in the 1930’s on the desolate coast of Essex, a place of creeks and watery marshes, with an abandoned lighthouse, and described as ‘one of the last of the wild places of England’. Here lived a lonely crippled hunchback called Rhayader, an artist who bought the lighthouse and surrounding marshland, and provided a sanctuary for wild creatures, especially the geese that ‘came winging down the coast from Iceland and Spitzbergen each October in great skeins that darkened the sky and filled the air with the rushing noise of their passage – the brown-bodied pink-feet, white-breasted barnacles, with their dark necks and clowns’ masks’. One day, a young girl, Fritha, brings to Rhayader a bird with a broken leg, shot by wildfowlers. The bird is a Snow Goose, white with black-tipped pinions, blown far off-course across the ocean by storms. Rhayader heals the injured bird, which he calls ‘La Princess Perdue’, the Lost Princess, and as time passes the Snow Goose comes and goes with the Pink-feet and the Barnacles. Friendship grows between Fritha and Rhayader. But war breaks out and Rhayader answers the call to takes his boat to Dunkirk to assist in the rescue of stranded soldiers, and La Princess Perdue flies with him.
This is a romantic story about love, loneliness and loss, and is perhaps over-sentimental. Well, it brought a tear to my eye! But it certainly portrays a landscape and a time that is believable. I will leave you to seek the conclusion to the story if you wish! In 1971 a film made for TV (available now on line) won the Golden Globe, and starred Richard Harris as Rhayader and Jenny Agutter as Fritha.
William Fiennes’s interest in Snow Geese had been aroused by reading Gallico’s story. It is said that the character of Rhayader was loosely based on Peter Scott, the ornithologist, conservationist and artist, the only son of Robert Falcon Scott, the Antarctic explorer. Peter Scott founded the Severn Wildfowl Trust, now the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, with its headquarters at Slimbridge, and had a huge influence on the development of waterfowl conservation in Britain.
But let me return to Looe’s geese! Apart from the Canadas, wild geese are rarely seen in Looe. The chances of seeing other goose species are quite small – looking for them might indeed be a bit of a wild goose chase. But there are sightings from time to time. The most likely to be seen is the Brent Goose, recognizable by its small black head and its white neck patch. This is a small dark goose, which breeds in Svalbard and Canada, and winters in small flocks on the south and east coast of Britain. It can be seen sometimes on the Tamar estuary and turns up occasionally in Looe.
I always study carefully the Looe flock of Canada Geese, because sometimes there will be another species mixing with them. The 2023 flock contained a solitary Barnacle Goose. In 2019 there had been three.
The Barnacle Goose is an attractive black and white bird, with a creamy white face, considerably smaller than the Canada Goose, and easily overlooked. Barnacle Geese prefer salt to fresh water and migrate to winter in Britain from their breeding grounds in the Arctic – Greenland, Svalbard and Novaya Zembla. The high latitudes offer long hours of summer daylight, and low numbers of predators, though Arctic foxes are a problem, leading many geese to nest on small offshore islets or on rocky pinnacles and cliffs (from which the goslings may have to plummet). In winter Barnacle Geese flock in large numbers to Northern Britain, notably to Islay in the Inner Hebrides and to the Solway Firth. Sadly, this species has been badly affected recently by Avian flu.
Barnacle Geese are not to be confused with Goose Barnacles. They once were! Sometimes I find on local beaches a piece of marine debris with strange living attachments, Goose Barnacles – long rubbery protrusions with shells/heads. They are crustaceans.
In medieval times it was concluded that these peculiar animals had grown on trees before falling into water and hatching into geese! Barnacle Geese were therefore accepted as a type of fish, and could be eaten by Roman Catholics on Fridays. How convenient! (You can find a fuller explanation in LMCG member Heather Buttivant’s brilliant book, Rock Pool).
Sometimes another migrant from the Arctic, the Pink-footed Goose, reaches Cornwall. This is probably the UK’s most numerous goose. In 2020 I spotted one in the Canadas flock on the East Looe river. Always scrutinise the flock for interlopers!
The Pink-foot does indeed have pink feet, and also has a pink band on its rather short bill. It is a medium-sized goose with a dark head and neck which breeds in Iceland, Greenland and Svalbard and migrates south-east to winter. They winter in large numbers in northern and eastern Britain, where they feed in intensively-farmed lowlands, and are often observed (and heard) flying in large flocks between roosting sites and feeding grounds. I see them on winter visits to North Lancashire, where they feed in grassy fields close to the coast, often sharing these fields with wild swans and grazing sheep. One memorable day two years ago my grandson and I went out looking for wild geese, but became so absorbed in watching a Kestrel perched on a telegraph pole, that we didn’t initially notice that the field below it was crowded with hundreds of Pink-feet!
The only other goose that I have seen on the Looe estuary occasionally in the last 20 years is the Egyptian Goose.
This ‘goose’ is actually most closely related to the Shelducks. In flight the Egyptian Goose looks heavy – more like a goose than a duck. Its dark brown eye markings give it a strange and sinister look, and it is aggressive to other birds. This is a ‘feral’ species – another reminder that geese are often kept in captivity and introduced into the wild either by accident (escapees) or deliberately. It was only added to the British bird list in 1971. The Egyptians regarded the goose as sacred. It is mainly a bird of tropical Africa, particularly East African lakes, but has been kept in captivity in Europe since the seventeenth century. Numbers in lowland Britain have increased slowly with East Anglia the main stronghold. There is a small breeding population in Devon which may be the source of the birds seen in Looe. Unusually for a goose, Egyptians nest in trees.
Addendum: A few days after completing this blog, I received a timely reminder of the presence of Canada Geese in Cornwall. On a visit to Cornwall Birds’ Walmsley Reserve in North Cornwall I encountered a large flock approaching 100 birds, and interestingly there were also at least three Barnacle Geese with them. But there was another species too that I have never seen in Looe – the Greylag Goose – the classic ‘grey’ goose (as opposed to the ‘black’ geese – Canadas, Brents and Barnacles). Greylags are scarce winter visitors in the South-west, and the ones I saw at Walmsley are known to be feral birds, deliberately released by a local Goose-lover (thanks to Walmsley warden, Adrian Langdon, for this information). They are known to have nested. I saw at least eight Greylags, and some were accompanied by a Barnacle Goose.
Breeding populations of Greylags are well-established in other parts of the country. I have, for example, seen them frequently in North Lancashire. Perhaps in time Greylags will become established as breeding birds in Cornwall as they are in many other parts of Britain.
Sources:
Buttivant, H. (2019} Rock Pool, September Publishing
Fiennes,W. (2002) The Snow Geese, Picador: Basingstoke
Gallico, P. (1941) The Snow Goose, Penguin: Harmondsworth
This is the 16th Bird Blog I have written for the Looe Marine Conservation Group. The first was in February 2020. All these Blogs are available on the LMCG Website and can be accessed from the Blog button. Most of them are accessed from pages 2 and 3.
Derek Spooner