Saving wetlands for wildlife & people
Saving wetlands for wildlife & people
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Svalbard Barnacle Goose surveys Abundance: annual counts Age Assessments: annual Click below to select results from: 2008/09 2007/08 2006/07 2005/06
Abundance From 1 October 2008 (by which time 4,567 Barnacle Geese had arrived on the Solway) to 25 May 2009 (when 22 remained), 18 coordinated counts were carried out across the whole of the Inner Solway Estuary. The peak count was 31,111 recorded on 15 October. As a precaution against the possibility of some of the birds having been counted twice, this count was averaged against all of those within 10% of it within the October to April period; five counts in all. This procedure gives an adopted population total for 2008/09 of 29,900 (rounded down to the nearest 100). This is an increase of 3% on the adopted population estimate of 2007/08 (29,000).
This winter a spectacular mass arrival was recorded by many observers on 1 October 2008 at Budle Bay, Northumberland. These birds moved on to the Solway that night and during the next few days such that the coordinated counts rose rapidly from 4,567 on 1 October to 23,022 by 8 October, with the whole population probably present on the Solway by 15 October when 31,111 geese were counted. Breeding success Between 2 October 2008 and 15 January 2009, a total of 10,300 Barnacle Geese was aged by a single observer at WWT Caerlaverock and at other sites around the Solway. A total of 17 flocks was sampled, varying in size from 217 to 5,550 birds. The number of birds sampled within these flocks ranged from 129 to 1,480. The overall percentage of young present in these flocks was 8.7%, ranging from 1.7% to 13.6% within individual flocks. As with the 2007/08 season, this value is above the current ten-year mean (7.8% ±1.4 SE), thus representing a reasonably good breeding season. Brood size was recorded for a total of 162 families, and the mean brood size per successful pair was 2.0 goslings, with brood sizes ranging from 14 goslings, down slightly on the previous year. The mean for the most recent ten-year period (1999-2008) remains unchanged at 1.9 (± 0.1 SE) goslings per successful pair.
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Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust
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