Pink-footed Goose Returns

Pink-footed Goose Visits Keswick

The Pink-footed Goose (Anser brachyrhynchus) has returned!  Or, this could be another individual.  For the purpose of this blog I am assuming this is the same bird that has been seen for the last three years in the Fredericton area.

Pink-footed Goose 

The Pink-footed Goose is an European species that is very rarely seen here.  It normally breeds in eastern Greenland, Svalbard (northern Norway) and the interior of Iceland.  It normally winters along the shores of Denmark and eastern Scotland in the North Sea and sometimes a bit further south. 

So, what is it doing here?  Well, it is not unusual for birds to get blown off course during migration.  Also, sometimes the migration patterns imprinted in their brains can get jumbled.  We do not really know why but wonder if pollutants, radiation, or disturbances in the Earth's magnetic fields, for example, could be causing deviant migration patterns.  In any case, a Pink-footed Goose is now living on the eastern shores of North America.  

Shown above is the individual seen at Keswick, near Fredericton on April 9, 2018.  It was associated with a very large number of Canada Geese (250) and 6 Snow Geese.  These birds were feeding on the Keswick flats where the spring snows had begun to melt and there was vegetation upon which they could feed.  What a wonderful sight it was!  See below for a photo of the Snow Geese that were with the flock.

Snow Goose

There have been other sightings of Pink-footed Geese in New Brunswick.  This rare visitor is making itself available to birders!  The present sighting was first made about the 1st of April in the same area.  The last sighting that I am aware of was on April 9.  In 2017 a Pink-footed Goose was seen in Sheffield east of Fredericton on 14 April and a few days around that date.  In 2016, one was seen at Fredericton at Carmen Creek Golf Course for several days in November.  Before that only one sighting had been made (as far as I know) and it was in 2010 on October 30 at Cocagne on the east coast of the province.  In my opinion that was a different individual from the one that has been seen in the Fredericton area for the last 3 years.  See below for a picture of the individual that was seen in Fredericton in 2016.

Pink-footed Goose

Arthur Cleveland Bent, in his Life Histories of North American Wild Fowl, 1923, gives some additional interesting facts about this species.  Only once before was it recorded in North America.  That was on September 25, 1924 from Essex County, Massachusetts.  He tells us that this species normally nests on the tundra in the very north of Europe and usually lays just 3 to 5 eggs.  After the young have been raised the adults moult and during that time the birds are vulnerable because they can only run away on their feet for protection.  Their only predators in past times were Arctic foxes.  Of course, now they must fear humans.  He relates that during the moulting period on Spitsbergen in northern Norway the biologists found great numbers of their wing feathers strewn along the shores.  He reports that they are the wildest and most unapproachable species of geese in Europe.  That is probably a good thing.  

I am hopeful that their population has increased to the extent that the occasional individual has found its way to eastern North America.