Brant

Voice

The flight call is the signature: a rolling, growling, faintly nasal rronk or rrot-rrot, which carries from a feeding flock as an unbroken rippling murmur across the flats. Heard from October to May, loudest when a flock lifts on a rising tide or as a Peregrine passes over.

Identification

A compact, short-necked goose with an entirely black head, neck and breast, the only white on the foreparts a small streaky collar patch. Adults show crisp white flank edgings and a strikingly white rear end around the black tail. First-winters lack the neck patch and show obvious pale tips to the wing coverts.

Confusion species

Barnacle Goose is larger and white-faced; Brent is almost wholly dark. Within the species the belly decides: dark-bellied bernicla has a dull grey-brown belly that barely contrasts with the black breast, while pale-bellied hrota shows a creamy belly cut sharply against the black, visible at long range.

Habitat

Strictly coastal outside the breeding season: intertidal flats with eelgrass and gutweed, saltmarsh, and adjoining brackish grassland and inner polders. Flocks graze the flats at low water and move onto saltmarsh and grass fields as the tide covers them. Breeds on arctic tundra in Siberia, close to the coast.

Range and movements

Dark-bellied birds breed on Taimyr and winter from the Wadden Sea to Brittany, with the Netherlands as the core; pale-bellied birds from Svalbard and Greenland winter in Denmark, Ireland and north-east England. In Spain the Brent is a scarce winter visitor, mainly in the Bay of Cádiz and along the Cantabrian coast.

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

Where and when to look

Go to Texel, Terschelling or the Frisian saltmarshes in April, when the birds are fattening for migration and flocks are at their biggest. Come around low water and scan the eelgrass beds; on Schiermonnikoog and in the Dollard they can feed right up to the dyke. Check every flock for Red-breasted Goose.

Conservation status

The population recovered spectacularly after protection in the 1970s but has been declining again since the turn of the century. Breeding success swings with the lemming cycle on Taimyr; loss of eelgrass beds, disturbance on saltmarsh and rank vegetation reduce food, and sea-level rise threatens the intertidal flats in the longer term.