As I keep saying, I do like to identify any wildlife I see, and feel mightily frustrated if I cannot discover what something is. It is, if anything, even more infuriating if I misidentify a species, particularly if the error is, as in the case, rather inexcusable.
This is a greylag goose. Its main distinguishing feature is its very orange bill. The trouble is that....
....very often the geese we have flying over, currently in their thousands, going north and south each day, are far too high to identify, and even when....
....they're occasionally lower, it's still difficult to distinguish features like their bill colour.
Back in February I took this picture of geese feeding in a field near Littleferry, and identified them as greylags. They're not, they're pink-footed geese, which have a smaller, much darker bill than greylags, but are otherwise very similar.
The large flocks which fly over are also all pink-footed. I know this now because I watched an AutumnWatch programme on the television the other night and realised that the calls our high-flying geese were making were not those of greylags.
While most of the large skeins flying over are pink-footed there are greylags around. We saw this small flock on Loch Fleet when we walked along the beach below Coul links.
I feel your pain. And then there are bean geese too! https://www.bto.org/develop-your-skills/bird-identification/videos/grey-geese
ReplyDeleteMy difficulty is often with distant or flying merganser and goosander which, like so much wildlife, can behave quite contrarily to the way they do in the books.
What - more geese to confuse me further!
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