ML503887131
Contributor
Date
Location
- Age
- Not specified
- Sex
- Not specified
Media notes
Small-billed/round-headed + leucistic
Observation details
The flocks here offer an endless conveyor belt of weird birds, and a fascinating cursory look at population dynamics. Watching subflocks; potential family groups and travel buddies; leads to the inevitable conclusion that individual variation across the species is maintained within close genetic pools and on local scales more often than it may be commonly credited. These subflock dynamics are evident across multiple axes of behavior. One axis is time: at dawn much of the geese on the water appear to be B. c. canadensis/interior birds, generally small-bodied and small-billed and darker overall. As the light came out, several flocks between 300-500 birds arrived and it was not until watching them land and mix with the geese already present that I realized how small those initial geese had been. This fresh injection of presumably Atlantic type birds (mixed max+moff+candensis genes) contrasted strongly with the others and also behaved differently, gradually approaching the shoreline more closely than did the others. These geese are ripe for research.
Technical information
- Dimensions
- 2810 pixels x 1872 pixels
- Original file size
- 4.77 MB