Greater white-fronted goose

Voice

A high, rapidly cackled two-syllable call, kyo-lyok, more musical and shriller than the hoarse honking of Greylag. Thousands together produce a rolling, laughing chorus. Most audible as flocks lift off at dawn and during passage in October and February.

Identification

Medium-sized grey-brown goose with a short pink bill, orange legs and a white blaze around the bill base. The belly carries irregular black bars, patterned differently on every bird. Juveniles in autumn lack both blaze and belly bars and are the real pitfall; they acquire the markings gradually through the winter.

Confusion species

Lesser White-fronted Goose is smaller and shorter-billed, with a yellow eye-ring, a blaze extending behind the eye, and wing tips projecting beyond the tail. Bean Goose lacks the blaze and has a dark head and a black-and-orange bill. Greylag is paler and bulkier with an all-pink or orange bill and pale grey forewings.

Habitat

Winters on grassland, winter cereals, maize and sugar-beet stubble and flooded floodplain meadows. Roosts on shallow open water, lakes, creeks and sandbars. Breeds on the arctic tundra of northern Russia and Siberia, in damp sedge vegetation along rivers and lakes.

Range and movements

The European population breeds in arctic Russia and winters almost entirely in the Netherlands, Germany and Poland, with the Netherlands the single most important wintering area worldwide. In Spain it is a rare visitor, with a few birds in northern wetlands and occasionally the Ebro delta in hard winters.

• Resident
• Breeding (summer)
• Winter
• Passage
• Migration direction
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

Where and when to look

Drive the floodplains and polders of the Dutch river district in December or January and be there at sunrise, when flocks move from roost to grassland. Then work through the flocks for noticeably small birds with a yellow eye-ring: Lesser White-fronts hide among them.

Conservation status

Numbers rose strongly for decades thanks to protection and nutrient-rich farmland, but breeding success swings widely with arctic weather and lemming cycles. The trend has recently levelled off and the wintering distribution is shifting east. Agricultural conflict and hunting pressure in eastern Europe now dominate management debates.