Snow Geese results & sightings

5 December 2011

Peregrine hunting over the 100 acre this morning JSLees WWT Send us you slimbridge photos If you think you have some shots that beat this one we would love to see them send them to james. [...]

Peregrine hunting over the 100 acre this morning JSLees WWT

Send us you slimbridge photos

If you think you have some shots that beat this one we would love to see them send them to james.lees@wwt.org.uk and we will publish them here.

Snow Geese isotope results

Back in June with had a flock of Lesser Snow Geese on the reserve for a few days. The birds were generally weary and spent most of the time far from the hides on the salt marsh. Also five of the birds were first summers and were in molt, we managed to obtain a few of these feathers for Isotope testing. They were sent to a lab in Canada for testing and we have just received the results.

The stable isotope analysis showed that these birds could not have grown the feathers on the putative breeding/molting grounds in North America. If they had, it would have shown much more negative feather values. The results are more consistent with areas of Europe like Holland and Germany. That is all we can say at this stage. We now need to pin point the European location from which they bred. We will update you and this situation, but it looks likely that they bred in Holland.

James