Greylag Geese watching

 In the last couple of weeks, a small flock of a dozen greylag geese has started to come to the local Park. Greylags are one of the most interesting local birds to watch. Once they land, the orderly formation breaks and pairs separate and noisily settle scores before starting their feeding with ritualized neck posturing. Despite being in a flock, pairs are usually quite easy to spot, they follow each other and the gander is slightly larger than the goose. When showing aggressiveness, one of the pair members lowers its neck and shows the beak to its opponent, with the partner following close. On quiet times, where no people are feeding the ducks, greylags head up to the large grass spaces of the park to feed. These are no wild geese, if you show some interest in them, they are likely to come closer to check if you have scraps, or even come right to you to demand some depending on their personalities. To watch them doing what if comes naturally to them you need to feign indifference. Today I watch six of them grazing.

Konrad Lorenz, the Nobel prize, carried out long term behavioural studies on hand-reared greylag geese to allow close approximation. His geese - which were individually named - lived free but did not migrate, so he could study them year round. Lorenz describes geese behaviour in detail in his book 'Here I am - where are you?' Lorenz first discovered the phenomenon of imprinting on geese, by which newborn birds attach themselves to the first moving object they see after hatching. The description of his first, serendipitous, realisation of imprinting is quite moving: 

'After the first gosling had hatched and dried, I was unable to resist the temptation of removing the delightful creature from under the foster mother and taking a closer look. As I did so, it gazed at me and soon began to utter its single syllable lost calls [...] I answered with a few comforting sounds. [...] Eventually, however, I had enough of this babysitting and placed the gosling back under the wings of the brooding domestic goose and started to leave. I should have known better.' 

The gosling started making distress calls and when Lorenz starts moving away, it follows him. Lorenz did a lot of babysitting from then on! 

The Greylag goose triumph ceremony (from one of Lorenz's papers on the behaviour of the Greylag geese).