The Greylag goose is the largest grey goose from the Anser genus of the Anatidae family of waterbirds. A stout, robust and heavyweight bird, the Greylag goose is the closest wild relative and ancestor to the domestic goose.
Greylag geese are distributed across much of Europe and Asia, extending into eastern Russia and China. Most populations migrate, but some are sedentary, including in much of Northern Europe.
The Greylag is the largest and bulkiest of the grey geese of the genus Anser, but is more lightly built and agile than its domestic relative. It has a rotund, bulky body, a thick and long neck, and a large head and bill. It has pink legs and feet, and an orange or pink bill with a white or brown nail (hard horny material at the tip of the upper mandible).
The plumage of the Greylag goose is greyish brown, with a darker head and paler breast and belly with a variable amount of black spotting. It has a pale grey forewing and rump which are noticeable when the bird is in flight or stretches its wings on the ground. It has a white line bordering its upper flanks, and its wing coverts are light-colored, contrasting with its darker flight feathers. Its plumage is patterned by the pale fringes of the feathers. Juveniles differ mostly in their lack of black speckling on the breast and belly and by their greyish legs. Adults have a distinctive ‘concertina’ pattern of folds in the feathers on their necks.
Greylag geese breed in Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Baltic States, northern Russia, Poland, eastern Hungary, and Romania. They also breed locally in the United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and North Macedonia. The eastern race extends eastwards across a broad swathe of Asia to China. European birds migrate southwards to the Mediterranean region and North Africa. Asian birds migrate to Azerbaijan, Iran, Pakistan, northern India, Bangladesh, and eastward to China. In North America, there are both feral domestic geese, which are similar to greylags, and occasional vagrant greylags.
Greylag geese seen in the wild in New Zealand probably originated from the escape of farmyard geese, same as in Australia, where feral birds are now established in the east and southeast of the country. Greylag geese breed on moors with scattered lochs, in marshes, fens, and peat-bogs, besides lakes and on little islands some way out to sea. They like the dense ground cover of reeds, rushes, heather, bushes, and willow thickets.
On their wintering grounds, they frequent salt marshes, estuaries, freshwater marshes, steppes, flooded fields, bogs, and pastures near lakes, rivers, and streams. They also visit agricultural land where they feed on crops, moving at night to shoals and sand banks on the coast, mud banks in estuaries, or secluded lakes.
This was photographed at Nalsarovar, Gujarat, India. Special thanks to the wise birders Latif Alvani and Kamruddin Alvani.
These rare photographs have been clicked and contributed by K. Shiva Kumar, a professional Wildlife Storyteller (M.A in Journalism & Mass Communication, an alumnus of Central University Of Odisha, Koraput) from Hyderabad, Telangana.
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