There seem to be so many different kinds of geese in England. As I mentioned in an earlier post, some of them were brought over as exotic pets, but there are certainly enough varieties that are native to the region as well. I really enjoy seeing them because they are fairly large, and as a result, it makes it easier to photograph them and see details about them up close. I love tiny birds, too, because they are often interesting and pretty, but you have to have a lot more patience and time to photograph them because they tend to flit around a lot and stay hidden in trees. Anyway, the greylag goose was yet another goose to be spotted at St James Park. I love their colour, especially the contrast with their brightly-coloured beaks.
Sometime when I have more time, I hope to just sit and watch them for a while. It's one thing to photograph birds, but I also get a lot of joy out of observing their behaviour when I get a chance. It also helps when the weather is cooperative. The last time I went to St James Park, it started raining, so it's not conducive for photography, at least for someone like me that isn't a professional and wouldn't have a set-up for protecting my equipment--only my camera, in my case.
In early July 2021, I was walking along a river path at low tide and came across a number of geese resting in the afternoon sun on the embankment. There was a mix of greylag geese and Canada geese. Of the greylag geese, I noticed there was a gosling, so that was really exciting because I've never seen a gosling of this species before--being that I had never seen the species until coming to the UK. So it's been really fun for me during breeding season to get to see babies of all these new birds I've been getting to know. One of the other surprising things I saw was the quills of the goose. I thought that there was some hidden blue feathers that only appear when they fly, and I don't get to see them flying often, so I thought that was a new detail for me, but when I uploaded my photos and looked closely, I noticed that they were not the full feathers after all but actually just the quills out of which its feathers were growing. So I guessed that perhaps the goose had molted a bit and then was growing new feathers. But it was fascinating to me because I never really thought about how their feathers grow but the soft, hair-like part grows out of the quill. It's almost like seeing a seedling sprout from a long seed or something like that. It looked really neat, and I was glad to have witnessed that. I've included a variety of photos in the album below.
Comments