Under Clear Skies

Just thought I’d stick up the pictures of the Greylag Goose as found by Greg Hanisek that Bill Banks kindly sent me so that people can have a look at the bird in question. You can read some discussion on the bird (here). Obviously not going to comment much on the bird itself (not my place) apart from to say that it’s all intact and not showing the revoltingly bloated look of your average farmyard domestic Greylag.

Waterfowl are a real quandary which is the reason I guess the ARCC (latest report here – which includes a couple of birds I had a hand in finding) came up with the ‘origin uncertain’ tag on their recent reports (back in the UK they generally tend to reject rare waterfowl reports unless there is some really strong evidence otherwise to assume the bird is of wild origin). You should have a look how long it took to get Hooded Merganser accepted onto the British List (here) it might help when reading the article to have some idea of how the category system work in the UK (here).