Abstract
During the last twenty years more than 2,500 Greylag Geese have been neck-banded at different moulting places in the Netherlands. Almost all birds have been re-sighted at least once. We used the 45,000 re-sightings that had been reported during the winter months October through February 1994–2010 in order to determine the migratory movements. We assume that the moulting site is about the same as the breeding site. Geese banded in west, central and south Netherlands wintered on average within 10 km from the breeding site. Geese from the northern part showed a much larger average distance, this was mainly due to a large proportion of them wintering in Spain. However, this habit changed during the course of the study, and in recent years only a small proportion wintered in Spain. We estimate that currently over ninety percent of the Dutch Greylag Geese are resident and winter close to their breeding site.
Highlights
In the first half of the 20th century the Greylag Goose was a migratory species which bred in Scandinavia and wintered in Spain
Since the 1970s the Greylag Goose population is rapidly expanding in size and range due to reduced hunting pressure and improved foraging conditions on heavily fertilized agricultural grasslands
Climate change resulted in significant increases in winter temperatures (Kleijn et al in press)
Summary
In the first half of the 20th century the Greylag Goose was a migratory species which bred in Scandinavia and wintered in Spain. From 1990 onward the number of ringed and especially neck-banded Greylag Geese has increased in the Netherlands (Buijs & Thomson 2001). Despite the increased ringing and neck-banding efforts, little information is available about the migration patterns of Greylag Geese breeding in the Netherlands (Speek & Speek 1984, Loonen & de Vries 1995). On the contrary a lot of information has been published about birds from populations that use the Netherlands for staging in spring and autumn but not for breeding (Nordic Greylag Goose Working Group 1988, Nilsson 1990, Voslamber et al 1993, Voslamber 1993, Andersson et al 2001)
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