Taiga Bean Goose, Horsey, Jan 24 2016, T.E. Allwood

A Tundra Bean Goose was reported from the Horsey area on Fri 22 and Sat 23 of Jan 2016. As this was the first Tundra of the year, I was quite keen to catch up with it and spent Sat afternoon searching but to no avail. Late on Sun morning, I decided to try the Horsey straight for geese and parked up to scan through the flock of over 1000 birds. A few birders came and went and after an hour or so I was watching with Chris Stone and a friend of his. Before long a possible Bean was seen in the flock. I quickly got onto it and was amazed at the sheer size of the bird in question. Indisputably a Bean Goose, being orange-legged, dark-backed and crisply plumaged with a narrow tail band and sharply white-edged dark tertials etc. It was huge and clearly dwarfed the accompanying Pinkfeet. It was so big that we actually started laughing at the size of it as it swaggered through the pinks. With every stride, its back end swung laterally an almost comical distance, making it appear very ungainly in comparison to the pinks. I think it was Chris who commented that it had to be a Taiga (and a big one at that!) as it was so obviously large and swan-like. I quickly rattled off a couple of record shots, before settling down to study the bird closely.

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Description

The head of the bird was very swan-like with a noticeably long wedge-like profile and a longer, shallower, almost concave looking bill with a flat-looking base rather than the shorter, chunkier and more bulbous Tundra-type bill with obvious grinning patches. The bill was roughly just over 50% orange with some orange going back further along cutting edges, so not as orange as some Taigas, but quite a bit more than typical Tundras which show a clear narrow orange band toward the bill tip. The neck appeared longer and somewhat narrower than I would expect on a typical Tundra, although this was somewhat subjective at times. There was also a lack of contrast between the dark head and the dark head, opposite to the usual colouration of Tundras

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 I sent the accompanying photo to Tom Lowe and Dan Brown who were both of the opinion that the bird was a Taiga with Tom commenting that the slightly wider white margin at end of tail and the breast tone were both indicative of Taiga over Tundra.

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The overall size and bulk of the goose and its exaggerated swaggering gait in comparison to accompanying pinks, along with the bill pattern, combined swan-like head and bill shape, the bill colouration, amount of white in tail, head and neck colouration etc all point to the bird being a fabalis (Taiga) Bean Goose – my first in my recording area of TG42.

I looked for the bird over the following few days, but neither it nor any other Bean Geese were seen.

A photo of the bird can be seen below:

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