Ten adult Greenland white-fronted geese turned up in a stubble field just north of
Little Woolden Moss on Sunday having previously been seen to fly over Woolston
Eyes the day before. I couldn't get there until today, but fortunately they
waited for me and were still present this morning.
According to Birds of the Western Palearctic, there was a world population of
20,000 Greenland white-fronted geese in the 1980s which thanks to hunting restrictions rose to
35,600 in the late 1990s (British Birds 99 May 2006 242–261). Since then numbers have declined markedly and Wexford Wildfowl Reserve in Ireland gives the world population size as 18,027 in 2022 which was a 10.7%
drop on the previous year.
These days up to 6,000 winter at Wexford Slobs, down from about 10,000 a few years ago. In November 2015 I visited the slobs specifically to see these birds. The Inner Hebridean island of Islay also has a wintering population of around the same size as Wexford which I also visited in 1997.
Excluding the flocks of 2000 that I saw at Wexford Slobs and on Islay, this is the first double figure count I have for the species since
June 1987 when I watched 12 fly between the islands of Hirta and Soay in the
St Kilda archipelago and before that in March of the same year I saw around
100 at Loch Ken in Dumfries and Galloway. Back in the early 1980s I
occasionally saw around 20 at various places on Deeside and on Anglesey.
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Greenland white-fronted geese, Little Woolden Moss - © John Tymon |
This bird was ringed as an adult female on 25th September 2016 at a staging
site in West Iceland. It was then seen at Loch Lomond that November, and
traditionally winters in Co Wexford, Ireland, before returning to the same
staging site in Iceland every spring/autumn. This is the first resighting
anywhere since 2020. It seems quite surprising that a bird with a neck collar
such as this could go missing for 4+ years, given that the species is usually
site faithful.
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