Bird of the Month: Greylag

The Greylag Goose

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd

I last had my bottom pinched 40 years ago, trooping from dinner at an ancient university. The suspect, judging by his exaggerated wink, was a venerable ecclesiastical scholar.

The other day, while I was bending over to feed some friendly red-breasted geese, it happened again. This time it was an indignant greylag goose (Anser anser; ‘lag’ an old name for goose). Its grand contempt was not surprising: the domestic goose, established in Egypt 3,000 years ago – where the greylag symbolised the sun god Ra – is its descendant. With Christmas dinner approaching, its sharp tweak was a timely reproof.

Greylag geese were a popular topic 70 years ago because of the Austrian naturalist Konrad Lorenz’s 1952 bestseller King Solomon’s Ring. The preface was by his teacher Julian Huxley, who wrote that to Lorenz we owe the discovery of the biological phenomenon of the ‘imprinting’ mechanism, whereby a human becomes parent to an animal.

It began when Lorenz bought some greylag eggs to be hatched and raised by a domestic foster mother. He could not resist picking up the first gosling, which protested plaintively. He soothed it with comforting noises, thus unwittingly ‘imprinting’ himself as its parent as the first being it met.

He named it Martina as a special pet, thinking one greylag would be easier to control than 10. He was wrong. Geese are instinctively socially organised. Martina’s nine siblings followed her example. He even had to teach them to fly – running ahead until the flock was forced to become airborne to keep up. Nevertheless, Martina remained his favourite. Research included his sharing his bedroom with her, which revealed not least that greylags are resistant to house-training.

Seventy years ago, the UK breeding population was confined to the Outer Hebrides and Scotland’s northernmost mainland. Today, breeding greylags are nationwide, and in Orkney – where in the 1960s, The Oldie’s Johnny Grimond tells me, ‘You would never see any geese in summer’ – they are a year-round pest. So much so that Scottish National Heritage has introduced a ‘greylag goose adaptive management programme’, which means they can be ‘culled’ (killed) on Orkney throughout the year.

As ubiquitous and breeding park birds, they do not require pinioning to prevent escape. Flights often pass Buckingham Palace on their way from St James’s Park. The UK’s growing resident population is increased by a winter influx of 230,000 migrants from Iceland.

Greylags lack the romance of carolling pink-footed geese, but their ‘silvershouldered’ wings, as Gavin Maxwell wrote in Ring of Bright Water (1960), make them exotic in flight.

These are not pretty birds,

Geese fleeing the freezing North.

Thick-necked, bulky and aggressive they are built for long-haul journeys and look better on the wing than on the ground. Ian Dunlop (b 1941), from The Urban Fox

Maxwell’s five imprinted greylags were as magical a part of his West Highland hideaway, Camusfearna, as his famous pet otters.

The 2022 Bird of the Month calendar is now available: www.carryakroyd.co.uk