Goose dropping
05 Jul 2013
You may wonder why the Greylag Goose reporting rate is one of the featured graphs on the Home page at the moment, and why – for a widespread and often abundant resident species – it shows such a marked dip in late June / early July. Like many other species of waterfowl, adult Greylags have a post-breeding moult in which they drop all their flight feathers simultaneously, rendering them flightless until new feathers grow. During this period, the birds often congregate on larger waterbodies to minimise the risk of predation, and may be absent from smaller waterbodies they frequented earlier in the breeding season. There are no early morning or evening roost flights either. These facts combine to make our resident geese less detectable for a few weeks in summer, hence the proportion of complete lists featuring the likes of Greylag and Canada Goose reach their lowest point of the year.
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