The Barnacle Goose is a medium sized goose. It has a black head, neck and breast with a creamy-white face which contrasts with its white belly, black tail and blue-grey barred back. It stands between 58-69cm with a fairly long neck and short, small bill.

Geographical Locations

The best place to see the Barnacle Goose is on the Solway Firth in England and Scotland and on Islay, Scotland. It likes to winter in the more temperate regions of Britain, Ireland, Germany and the Netherlands. The Barnacle Goose breeds in Arctic regions of Greenland, Svalbard and Russia. The Greenland population confines itself to the west of Scotland and Ireland with the main winter resort in Argyll on Islay.

Habitat

The Barnacle Goose likes many different habitats including natural, semi-natural and agricultural grasslands, arable stubbles, sea-washed grasses on uninhabited islands, salt marsh at the heads of tidal lochs and dune grasslands.  They like to roost on tidal mud flats, offshore uninhabited islands, beaches and occasionally inland.

During the autumn and winter months they tend to use the open salt marsh and intensive pastures found along the Inner Solway coast. Otherwise they like to rest and roost on the mud and sandbanks of the Solway estuary. The birds wintering in Northern Europe migrate south in the latter part of August or the early days of September. Some small flocks of Barnacle Geese migrate to the Mediterranean, Azores and some move to the eastern coast of North America. The Greenland populations of Barnacle Geese fly across Iceland, flying over open water and then down the coast of Scandinavia.

Feeding

Barnacle Geese are plant and vegetable eaters and like to feed on improved agricultural ground where they can graze on rye-grass, fescues, timothy and clover. They have a very simple digestive system, so they need to feed on high quality plants and are very choosey about what they eat. They will also graze on the stubble of spring sown cereal crops if they are available. During the breeding and nesting time they feed on a variety of wetland vegetation such as grass, horsetail and moss which they find on the wet meadows at the edge of many pools and the vegetation that grows along the coast line. Sometimes the birds will have to swim a couple of kilometers to find suitable feeding areas. The birds that breed in the Arctic feed on the drier swards of the tundra, mosses and liverwort.

During the winter months they eat grass, marine plants and seaweed. Sometimes as a supplement to their diet they will eat crustaceans, mollusks and marine bugs.

Breeding

The limited food available on the breeding grounds means that the geese have to mate and lay their eggs as quickly as possible on arriving. The young geese need time to grow fat and learn to fly before the start of the autumn migration. The geese arrive at the breeding grounds any time from 15 May to the beginning of June.

The eggs are laid in a nest built in a depression and lined. The nest site can be as high as 160 feet above the seashore. It is usually sheer precipice with a colony of guillemots, kittiwakes and other marine birds. They like to nest near raptors to protect them from their main predator, the Arctic Fox.

The female lays three to five white eggs in the second half of June. She may lay as many as seven eggs. The incubation period is 24-25 days and the female incubates the eggs by herself. The young are active and downy on hatching and after they dry out they jump from the nest on the cliff face into the sea. They cannot fly but they start swimming immediately.

Threats

Low temperatures and prolonged snow in the breeding areas in early June can delay egg-laying. If there is a poor grass growth and high predation, this can result in less than 5% of young being produced. Only a small percentage of birds will attempt to breed most years and many geese remain unmated for several years.

Their main predators are the arctic fox, Glaucous, Gulls and Skuas. Arctic foxes will often scavenge the young who injure themselves during their leap from the nest into the sea or they may swim to the islands to eat the eggs and young.

Global warming makes the sea ice conditions unpredictable which can mean that Polar Bears will feast on the colonies when they cannot find seals.