Over the last week my birding mate Alf and I have made a concerted effort to find some ‘Grey Geese’ on our local patch. Between mid -November and mid- March is the best time to look for geese on the lower Carrs of Pickering here in North Yorkshire. One species of winter geese particularly synonymous with our local area are Pink-footed geese. Pink-feet migrate from their Northern strongholds in huge numbers in the winter months. The populations of Iceland and Greenland spend the winter in the United Kingdom and the Svalbard population spend their winter in Netherland and Denmark with small numbers also wintering on the coasts of Northern Germany and Belgium.Individual birds have also turned up as vagrants in the Canary Islands and Morocco !!! An added incentive for our geese watching is the prospect of recording White -fronted geese to our local patch list. There has been a large influx of White-fronts into South Eastern Britain over the last 3 weeks with a few recorded in North Yorkshire already – so all we need is a bit of luck!!
During the last week, huge numbers of Pink-feet have been seen flying along the North Yorkshire coast and indeed over many inland sites too. So it was time to get out and do some birding !! This Tuesday 15th December we were in luck. A huge flock of Greylag geese were found in flooded fields off the Low Marishes-Yedingham road – with fantastic numbers of Wigeon easily 500 birds and a few Pink-feet; surely there should be more?? Not satisfied, on the Wednesday, we had another trip out….our luck was in. We located a flock of Pinkfeet feeding in a stubble field off the Marishes road. We carefully scanned the flock for White-Fronts but no luck. We had at least 300-400 Pink-feet in a large flock – the noise they made was incredible. What a privilege. to see so many birds!!! On Thursday 18th December the lure of the geese was to much and we decided to go back for a third visit; this time the weather was better with some prolonged sunny intervals. We found the Greylag flock again, but to our great surprise there amongst the the Greylags was a small flock of Barnacle Geese – 20 in all. This was a new local bird for us both and we were well chuffed! We also re-located the Pink-feet as they were in the same stubble field and I managed a few shots! Again careful scanning revealed no Whitefronts – but the Barnacles we saw yesterday, certainly made up for them. It is always nice to see birds on premier nature reserves, or ‘twitch’ a rare species – but for me you cannot beat finding something on your local patch and these Pinkfeet certainly ticked all the boxes!!!
