I have chores to do, but they can wait. When two birds from Europe show up in Maine, it’s time for a wild goose chase.
You’re partially responsible for this, you know. A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that if anyone sees a barnacle goose, they should let me know right away. Almost immediately, an alert reader tipped me off to two barnacle geese visiting Collins Pond in Caribou.
Barnacle geese are easy to find. You just have to go to their isolated cliff-top nesting colonies in the arctic tundra of Greenland, Norway or Siberia. Greenland and Norwegian geese go to Ireland and Scotland for the winter. Russian geese prefer Germany and the Netherlands. Fortunately for us, some can wander off course, and they do show up here on very rare occasions.
It was with some misgivings that I awoke at 4 a.m. for a morning drive to northern Maine. I had tried this wild goose chase before. A barnacle goose visited the same pond in 2004. It stayed for several days, finally leaving just moments before I arrived. For 12 years I have nursed the grudge and waited for another to return.
Barnacle geese are smaller than Canada geese. They are about the size of brant, another medium-sized goose that visits Maine often. For many years, they were considered to be a variation of the same species, but modern genetic analysis shows that barnacle geese are more closely related to cackling geese than brant. Barnacle geese are dark on top, light on the bottom, and have a distinctively white face on an otherwise black head.
I have a 1939 copy of Roger Tory Peterson’s original “Field Guide to the Birds” in which he displayed a surprisingly personal opinion about the goose. Despite the fact that it had been reported only a few dozen times in North America, he included it in the goose section of the guide, explaining: “It is so boldly patterned and so well worth looking for that I have included it here rather than on the accidental list.”
Their nesting habits also have given them a fan base on the internet. Barnacle geese nest on mountain cliffs where they are inaccessible to arctic foxes. But as soon as the chicks hatch, they must be led to water where they can feed. When they are 3 days old, the babies jump from the cliff top, bouncing off rocks all the way down to the ground below. Their light weight and downy feathers cushion the fall, enabling many to survive. But foxes are attracted to the noisy parents, and they wait below to snap up any slow and injured chicks. There are videos of this phenomenon all over YouTube.
Barnacle geese were familiar winter birds to Europeans, but their nesting areas were so remote that nobody knew anything about them. Naturally, folklore filled the gap. Early legend posited that they were made of wood, and did not nest or lay eggs. Others said they sprang from goose barnacles, hence the name. Happily, if they started out life as barnacles, that meant they were more fish than bird, and Catholics could eat them on meatless Fridays. In 1215, Pope Innocent III put a stop to that, declaring that even if they came from barnacles, they acted like ducks and thus couldn’t be eaten on Fridays or during Lent.
There are places in Maine where Canada geese congregate in the fall. Large flocks gather in Yarmouth. Some fields in coastal Washington County get a lot of geese. But nothing matches the quantity of geese that invade Aroostook County. They start each day foraging in the abundant croplands, then head for town ponds to loaf through midday. In town, they are safe from hunting, and they know it. Collins Pond in downtown Caribou is so famous for this spectacle that it is site 82 on the Maine Birding Trail.
I arrived at the pond at 8:30 a.m., too early for the goose gathering. The birds started to fly in from the fields by 10 a.m., and a diminutive cackling goose provided early entertainment until the barnacle geese arrived at 10:45 a.m. After checking them off — 577 on my North American life list — I headed south, stopping at another pond in downtown Mars Hill, where a greater white-fronted goose paddled amid 500 Canada geese. Two of the Canada geese sported yellow collars. They had been tagged by biologists in Greenland. For geese, northern Maine is an international resort. Go take a gander.
Bob Duchesne serves as vice president of Maine Audubon’s Penobscot Valley Chapter. He developed the Maine Birding Trail, with information at mainebirdingtrail.com. He can be reached at duchesne@midmaine.com.