Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 04:31:49 -0500 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Fran Saunders Subject: FW: "Blue" Goose? MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit More on this topic. See Paul Pisano's note at the end. Fran Saunders MOS State Web Site Director http://www.MDBirds.org Silver Spring, MD -----Original Message----- From: Mary Paul Sent: Monday, February 25, 2002 1:22 PM To: webmaster@mdbirds.org Subject: "Blue" Goose? I originally saw this bird on 1/25/02 but wasn't sure what it was. I don't know if fits into this list since is may be a hybrid. Mary Maxey Paul USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center 11510 American Holly Drive Laurel, MD 20708-4017 301-497-5725 (office) 301-497-5744 (fax) ----- Forwarded by Mary Paul/BRD/USGS/DOI on 02/25/2002 01:18 PM ----- Subject: "Blue" Goose? Hi Mary, I just wanted to let you know that I looked for, and saw, the possible Blue Goose that you had seen at Kingman. This was yesterday (Sat.) morning. I found the bird amongst a big flock of Canadas feeding on the golf course, about 2/3 the way to the foot bridge. I left the bird on the golf course, but I'm sure it was going to be flushed shortly afterwards as the golfers were working their way up the course. Anyway, I was really torn over the id of the bird (and still am). When I first saw it I thought, "there's the Blue Goose." And thought that was that. However, I was able to get pretty close to the bird, and after watching it for a while, I'm leaning towards it being a bird of mixed parentage. 90+% of looks like a Blue Goose, but here are some things that I thought were wrong with it being a pure Blue: 1. Size - the bird stood as tall as the nearby Canadas, and I think they were of the normal to large variety (ie, they weren't small Canadas). It's neck was shorter than the Canadas, but body mass looked about the same. 2. Soft parts - For a pure, adult Blue, the bill and legs should be pink. For this bird, both the bill and legs were mostly grey with just a hint of pink (moreso in the bill than the legs). 3. Underparts - The lower neck on this bird was very dark, as it should be, but then changed to a medium to light brown belly & flanks. As far as I can tell, pure Blues shouldn't look like that. They should either be near black all the way to the white undertail coverts, or perhaps a dark gray. I don't think there should be any brown tones in there. Based on these features, I would guess that it's a Blue x Canada, but I wouldn't bet the rent on it. The only other possibility that I can't argue against is that it's a young Blue that's going through the normal aging process. This could explain the soft parts - since they go from gray to pink over the course of their first winter. However, from what I can see in my references, their belly should be dark, not brown, and they still wouldn't be that big. I also wonder if a young bird would achieve near-adult plumage, yet still retain such young-looking soft parts. In other words, I would think they'd all change at the same time. So based on all that, I'm tending towards calling it a mixed breed. However, I'd be happy if someone proved me wrong, as I've yet to see Snow Goose (white or blue) in DC. Good birding, Paul Pisano cheep@erols.com P.S. Keep an eye out for a darkish back Lesser Black-backed Gull. I saw a bird on Kingman Lake that was almost tending toward the intermedius race of this species (a darker gray). We normally have the lighter colored race here, called graellsii. ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================