Red-breasted Goose – Caerlaverock Wildfowl and Wetlands Reserve, Caerlaverock, Dumfries and Galloway, 6^th October 1991

Sunday the 6th October 1991. Tomorrow is another day. Within a day of attempting a Red-breasted Goose at Inner Marsh Farm (and within seven days of my fateful trip to Sumburgh for the Sandhill Crane; I’m giving up birding and all of that),

I went to Caerlaverock with Neil Tasker, having seen him at Inner Marsh Farm, for this, a far more credible bird. After we had worked for it very hard for 2.5 to 3.0 hours and obtained two flight views of it amongst large flocks of Barnacle Geese it finally succumbed.

The flight views were very skilfully obtained from the tower hide by watching distant flocks as they moved, eliminating Barnacle Geese and picking out the goodie, as it was smaller, darker and quicker in flight than its hosts.

Finally, after teasing us for ages, it was located in a feeding flock of Barnacle Geese near one of the towers and once located here it was predictably obvious. It made itself more so by being separate from the flock for most of the time, indeed Barnacle Geese shied away from it.

It was well ‘scoped whilst resting and feeding and the stunning pattern was sketched (as it couldn’t really be described!).

Best of all, it looked wild!

Not something I’ve seen subsequently (partly as, conveniently, I didn’t need it for Scotland!) but I have since seen one on the Belgium/Netherlands border.

Red-breasted Goose, polders north-east of Antwerp, Belgium, March 2022 (photograph credited to Paul Pugh).