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Geese breeding


Smiler23
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Hia folks, during the spring I always presumed that all animals had young, on one of the local reservoirs there are a lot of geese without ,my mate is down there regular and I think he said there are 3-4 clutches of geese, yet 30 others are just swimming around doing there daily thing with out young, is this normal?? Could it be that the majority are young birds nit yet sexually mature???

Edited by Smiler23
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The very argument about out of season culling under GL revolves around this in the main. You cannot monitor population until things are too late as Geese mature to a breeding state far slower than most Birds that mostly breed the season after they themselves were born. A few years not a few months in the case of geese then they tend stick to the same mate.

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That makes sense thanks fellas... We don't have a massive amount of geese round here, be nice if all these young birds that are here got chance to pair up and breed over next couple of springs

 

Quite this is why many clubs take legal quarry like greys off the allowed quarry list or severely restrict the shooting of them when they are breeding here. Imagine what might happen if countries were migrant geese breed allowed summer shooting or culls by other means...............

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A summer cull around here kent would eradicate geese, we have a couple of reservoirs and park lakes were they are in small numbers ( maybe 50 on each) at the minute there flying low all over the place, you could pop them off very easily....

 

There are people who should like that, not all opposed the summer shooting of greys and Canadas are still shot under some shaky justification at times. We must always be ready to fight this and it will come again

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Greylag and canadas are treated differently by law. While I do not agree with it canadas can be shot at any time of the year with no need for justification in the same manner as crows or wood pigeons under the General licence. Greylags can only be shot outside of the wildfowling season with a speciel licence for which a reason is neccessary. An effort was made to put greylag onto the general licence last year which thankfuly was defeated.

 

Greylag do not usually breed until they are three years old , though a few may do so in their second year. In any population probably a third to half the birds will be to young to breed. There will also be adult failed breeders and a few unmated birds so in any flock prehaps half or less will have bred in any one year.

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Is there any other birds which have a slow maturity process??? I understand a lot of places have geese in problem proportions but a summer cull / general licence would have a bad effect and thin them out dramatically wouldn't it?

 

And unpredictably that's the point GL is re-issued cased on counts made each year it might be 3-4 years before things really got bad. lets say after the first year more than the normal amount were not going to be able to breed when the count was taken, this has to get worse again in the third year, the fourth could be a disaster. I do see areas were Canadas have been decimated by the issue of GL .

GL is far from perfect

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Many large species of birds take several years befor they are old enough to breed. Eagles can be 5-7 years before they breed many waders are 2 years old, large gulls 3-4 years old, as a rule ( there exceptions ) the more long lived a bird is the fewer eggs they lay and the older they are before they start to breed. In contrast short lived birds breed in the next spring and often lay large clutches knowing only a small percentage will live to breeding age. However when birds reach breeding age many are not very successful until they have had several attempts. pratice makes perfect, inexperianced birds often nest in unsuitable places or are poor at raising their young.

 

There is no set level when birds are put on the GL. It mainly depends when the population reaches a level when they start to cause econimic losses or are a threat to public health or a threat to native wildlife.

Edited by anser2
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I am lead to believe that one of the issues regarding the Greenland Whitefronted Geese is that they are not Successfully breeding until they are 6yrs old as opposed to 3yrs old as what was previously thought . Not sure if this is contributing to their decline' but it surely is not helping their numbers increase at any rate.

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that is very interesting about the Gwf and something we must consider. This year the waders and other ground nesters have fared very bad here due to all the rain I have yet to see any young at all :unhappy: we have curlew, oyster catcher, lapwing in the main. I have been watching a mated pair of Canada also and although it good too see how closely bonded they are no young as yet, I suspect these are first timers and as anser2 suggests not got the greatest of experience just yet. What a shame it would be to shoot this pair and to do so legally under GL and there are those about who might relish the easy shots they might be able take at them.

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Flaw? not particularly they have a lot to learn and it takes time. Whom ever or what ever created them never figured on six guys concealed on their feeding grounds during the breeding season with 5 shot autos and a stack of decoys with a blood lust for numbers to brag about.

 

One must remember we hunted out the native breeding Greylag in nearly al of the uk about 100 years ago and its taken till recently to re-establish a population that some choose to call Feral (though they actually came from the last stock Scotland) WAGBI and a few notable names of the past made great personal efforts to replace what was lost through greed last time round when guys only had primitive muzzle loaders and no freezers

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It seems a bit of a flaw in the goose, the slow maturing bit, in certain places I suppose it could be the downfall of them if everyone was trigger happy......

Do not forget that geese evolved long before men developed guns. The main natural mortality in geese takes place before they can fly. Big gulls , skuas, foxes take their young before they can fly , but once flying their main predators were large raptors and natural disasters, severe cold ,disease ect . So once fledged a goose stands a very good chance of living a very long time. Well that was before those nasty ******* came along with guns .

 

Its strange that Greenland white fronts take so long before breeding in the wild. In captivity they will breed at three years old like most geese so perhaps its food related in the breeding grounds or density dependant factors ( not enough habitat for all the birds to breed so the older stronger birds take the best breeding sites.

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Competition on the breeding ground is a big factor with the brown hare. Older dominant hares hold prime spots but yet have a lower fecundity, never read this or heard it spoken of but a policy of killing the biggest hares late on in the winter or culling hard in pockets were hares have not been shot then sitting back and waiting a year or two seems to increase numbers in my experience. This harps back to killing the biggest oldest stags and yeld hinds in deer- bit hard to sort in Greenland white fronts though. Anyhow that evidence of three years breeding in captivity seems to support the claim :hmm:

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Anser2' I respect the fact that there are Few if any on here or other Forums who have as much knowledge of Wildfowl as yourself.

 

My post regarding the GWF's has come from the horses mouth so to speak.

 

One of' if not the leading Men in The GWF conservation project gave our Club a Talk and a slideshow a few years back and this was one of their findings over an observed period of time.

 

I did ask the Question' Did the Canada geese Now also breeding on the Western coast of Greenland have any effect on the WF's breeding' Competition for food or nesting Space ect and i was told that there was no apparent evidence of this to date. He did mention that Arctic foxes were a problem..

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Waren M & Fox A D wrote a paper in Condor 94,1992 http://www.jstor.org/stable/1369269?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents,stating that even in the wild Greenland Whitefronts were pairing when 2.46 years old presumable getting ready to breed in their third year ,which would tally with my experance of breeding them in captivity in their third year . So something in the wild is preventing young pairs in breeding in the wild in Greenland. Breeding production seems quite good in those pairs that do breed , but only a small percentage of adults breed. Between 2005\06 and 2013\14 the brood sizes reaching the UK were between 2.79 and 3.37. Yet in the poulation as a whole only between 6.9 and 14.4% of the birds in the whole flock were young. In contrast bean geese in Scotland had smaller brood sizes 2.4, yet the percentage of young in the whole flock was 34.5%. So unlike the GWFG, bean geese despite a poorer recruitment into the population many more pairs bred resulting in double the production of young in the flock.

 

There is a school of thought that poor spring weather due to climate change is responsible for the poor breeding success within the whole flock , but that does not take into account that those geese that do breed are producing quite good broods, though the majority of the adults seem to be producing almost nothing.

 

 

Its probable that the main reason is that good safe breeding sites are limited and the older stronger adults ( and possable recent colonising lesser canada geese ) lay claim to them leaving the younger pairs to breed in unsafe sites where predation is high or food is short. Many of those young birds seem to be losing their eggs\young or are unable to establish a territory and not breeding at all.

Edited by anser2
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