Barnacle Goose
Branta leucopsis
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The Solway's signature bird — the entire Svalbard population winters here and almost nowhere else.
A small, sharply marked black-and-white goose: creamy-white face, black neck and breast, and a silver-grey barred back. Barnacle geese are the defining winter bird of the Solway. The whole Svalbard breeding population — tens of thousands of birds — winters on this estuary, concentrated around Caerlaverock and the merse east of Dumfries, arriving in late September and October and leaving in April.
Behaviour
Barnacle geese graze the merse and improved grassland in dense, tightly packed flocks, keeping up a continuous yapping chatter that carries a long way — often likened to a pack of small dogs. They roost on the sandflats. The recovery of this population from a few hundred birds in the 1940s to tens of thousands today is one of the clearest conservation successes anywhere on the Scottish coast.
Migration
These birds breed on Svalbard, deep inside the Arctic Circle, and travel down the Norwegian coast to the Solway each autumn — a route so consistent that the Svalbard population is treated as effectively separate from the Greenland and Russian barnacle geese wintering elsewhere in Britain.
When to see it
Quick facts
- Family
- Ducks, geese and swans (Anatidae)
- Size
- 58–70 cm
- UK status
- Amber-listed
Photo by Andreas Trepte, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons