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All: Angus MacLean has clarified the colour of the orbital ring of the goose by pointing out to me that enlarging photos (as I did to assess the orbital ring colour) adds pixells and dilutes colours. Indeed,in some of the un-enlarged photos, the ring does appear distinctly orange. This is o.k for some first-winter birds. In the Western subspecies, adults (like the one in Connecticut last winter) the ring tend to be more vividly orange or red. On another matter, several (including the Truro Daily News) have referred to the goose as coming from (western) Europe. Those populations, including birds nesting in Britain and Ireland, are non-migratory. Our goose, if wild, would certainly have come from the population (80,000+) nesting in Iceland and mostly wintering in the British Isles. The species is only a vagrant in Greenland, but once there, it probably joined a flock Canada Geese. These have spread to breed in W. and S. Greenland during the later last century. They still follow their ancestral migratory route to New England and beyond via Ungava and through e. QC, PEI, NB and w. NS, rather than down the Atlantic Coast (as pointed out earlier by Eric Mills). Cheers, Ian Ian McLaren
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