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Canada Goose | Branta canadensis
Grote Canadese gans | Barnacla canadiense grande
The Canada Goose is the bird by which North America counts off its seasons: the skeins over the city, the clamour out of the dark. In a single century it went from a hunted migrant to the most numerous goose on the continent — and in many places into a resident that never leaves at all.
Voice
A loud two-syllable call, a-HONK, which male and female alternate in duet: the male lower and longer, the female higher and shorter, so that at a distance it sounds like one bird. Flying flocks call almost without pause; on the ground a bird warns with a low hissing hrrronk and outstretched neck. Cackling Geese call higher and more yelping, which in mixed flocks is often the first difference to register.
Recording: Stanislas Wroza — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Arrondissement de Charleville-Mézières (near Fumay), Ardennes, Grand Est, France · xeno-canto
Identification
Black head and neck with a sharply defined white cheek patch that runs beneath the throat, a tan to greyish breast, brown upperparts with pale feather edges, and white tail coverts forming a clean band above the black tail in flight. Size varies considerably: eastern and southern birds reach 110 cm, while northern parvipes falls far short of that. The sexes are identically marked; the male is larger and holds its neck straighter. Juveniles have a duller cheek patch with a blurred edge and untidier flank barring.
Confusion species
Cackling Goose (Branta hutchinsii), split off in 2004, is the real problem: smaller, with a short stubby bill, a rounded head, a far shorter neck and often a darker, greyer breast. Because small forms of this species overlap in size with large hutchinsii, some birds must be left unnamed — bill profile and neck length count for more than bulk. Barnacle Goose has an entirely white face and silver-grey upperparts; Brant is much smaller and darker, with only a white neck patch and no cheek patch.
Habitat
Grassland beside water in any form: tundra lakes and river flats in the north, and in the south mown turf along golf courses, park ponds, campuses, retention basins and highway verges. What it needs is short grass to graze and open water to escape to, and that combination has been built on a vast scale. Outside the breeding season it feeds on stubble of maize, wheat and young winter cereals.
Where the bird is most often found, arranged by the USNVC — the vegetation classification of the United States and Canada — and CMECS for sea and coast.
Range and movements
Breeds from Alaska and the Canadian tundra south across the whole of Canada and far into the United States, and since the 1980s in rapidly growing numbers in West Greenland, where it is pushing into the breeding grounds of the Greenland White-fronted Goose. Migratory birds winter in the southern United States and into northern Mexico. Alongside these there is now an immense population descended from released birds, resident year-round across the temperate United States and southern Canada and no longer migrating at all.
- Resident
- Breeding (summer)
- Winter
- Passage
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
Where and when to look
In a mixed goose flock look at the bill before the bulk: how long it is, and how gradually it runs up into the forehead. On migration the skeins can be listened to as well as counted — the higher, yelping call betrays Cackling Geese in a flock that otherwise looks like a single species.
Conservation
Least Concern (LC), and locally too numerous. The giant subspecies maxima was considered extinct around 1950, until a wintering flock was rediscovered at Rochester, Minnesota, in 1962; releases across the country followed. The residents that resulted now cause conflict — grazed-out parks, fouled bathing water, collisions with aircraft — and are locally rounded up during the moult or shot. Migratory populations from the far north are more vulnerable and are managed separately.
Scientific name
Branta canadensis | (Linnaeus, 1758)
Linnaeus described the species in 1758 as Anas canadensis, among the ducks; because it was later moved to another genus, author and year stand in parentheses. The genus Branta was introduced by Scopoli in 1769; it is a Latinised form of Old Norse brandgás, 'burnt goose', after the sooty black of head and neck. canadensis is Neo-Latin for 'from Canada'. The type material came from Canada; Todd proposed Quebec City as the type locality in 1938.