The Occasion
While I take matters of ecology seriously, and indeed have done ecological projects, I revel in ignorance on matters of species name and full lists of things. My knowledge of birds equates to a familiarity with the locals and a shameless cluelessness on the difference between a whooper swan and a mute swan. I find that my lack of encyclopaedic bird knowledge grants me a freedom that many fine birdwatchers have, but others have lost. An ability to look at a bird and think “oh that looks cool”, protecting one’s childish joy of laughing at something with a silly beak, or cool patterns is something I feel should not be lost in taking ecology seriously.
All this is to say, while visiting a fine country park, with kayakers on a large lake in blazing sun, I met a cool looking goose. I could not tell you why the goose was alone, nor its pronouns, but it did look cool. The funky fellow gladly took some seeds from me and gave what I interpreted to be an appreciative honk.
AllAboutBirds.org quite harshly describes the sounds made by my new friend as a simple repertoire of snarls, grunts, honks, and hisses. Happy to have seen a creature I’ve not seen before, and have determined it to be friend, I opened google lens and took a photo before I continued walking. Due to poor signal it was some 3 or 400 metres before google lens loaded an image search result for what it believed my friend to be.
When the result loaded I felt at first intrigue, then a slump that ruined the rest of my nature adventure for the day. My seed eating accomplice’s name is “Egyptian Goose”, my mind at first went to the great migrations some fowl are able to undertake, had they really flown here all the way from Egypt? Traded Alexandria for Aylsham? The answer is in fact no. The first brief lines of summary crushed any glamour. The Egyptian Goose is non-native to the UK, brought over as a so called ornamental bird, which has since escaped and set up shop around East Anglia and the Thames.
At once I felt a sense of guilt for enjoying the presence of the bird, that ecologically is the enemy, to admire a non-native taking up habitat space in the reeds where native birds should nest. I felt like someone who had got too emotionally invested in a musician before checking their old tweets. But if the bird is there, is it not better for me to enjoy its presence, appreciate nature in its messy, tampered state?
The bird
A long since passed ancestor of the cool looking goose was bundled aboard a boat of wood and cloth and sailed at around 8mph, to be placed in St James’ Park as a gift to Charles II of England around 400 years ago. The two most likely locations of the bird’s barge bundling were the lower nile valley and what is now South Africa. The shorter of those two trips was 7000km, the best estimates I can find suggest this would’ve been 5-8 weeks, locked aboard a ship, for a small handful of geese who only knew the sweltering lakes of the Nile.
The Guardian asserts that the Egyptian Goose struggled to breed well and survive in the UK for its first 300 years here, and notes that to this day they still breed around December time, which is heavily disadvantageous for them in British conditions. By 1950 the wild population was restricted to modest areas of the Norfolk broads. By 1970 a slew of warmer years let them expand their range to all of Norfolk. In this time the very first pairs were recorded breeding in the Netherlands, understood to be some Norfolk birds that flew south. Nowadays there are over 100,000 Egyptian geese in the Netherlands. Any dutch viewers will likely be surprised that I had never seen one before. Despite hundreds of years evidence of the risk of introducing new species to regions, Texans may as also recognise the Egyptian Goose, since it was taken there from England in the 1900s for the same ornamental garden purposes as before. A wild population enjoys lakes in parks and golf courses across the state, finding the warmer temperatures much closer to home than their original, but not original, British home.
While the population has not skyrocketed as extensively as in The Netherlands, the Egyptian goose now has 1000 breeding pairs across South East England and the East Midlands. At this point it is too profligate to remove without great expense, so it seems the Egyptian Goose is our goose now, and here to stay. As climate change progresses, all prediction models imply Britain will only get closer to the native conditions the stolen goose is most successful in.
The feelings
After finding out far more about this cool looking goose than intended we are stuck left trying to form an opinion. Given they reach breeding maturity in a couple of years, the goose I saw in Norfolk may have a local lineage over 100 generations old, certainly the premise that the goose is anything other than local is well beyond the comprehension of the goose itself, even if there is goose linguistics beyond our best imagination.
It may be tempting to say I would be happier if I didn’t know, but that type of ignorance is exactly how we end up releasing the same goose into the USA and causing the same problem there all over again. I do think though we should not let these things diminish our enjoyment of nature, after all, it is still a cool looking goose regardless of 17th century colonial swiping. It’s hard for me to look at it quite the same now when I revisit the park, I cannot un-know that at least 3 countries have growing populations of them as a consequence of colonial exploits and the desire to look at something exotic out the window. Despite this, I encourage all of those who are not complicit in making new invasive species problems to go out and enjoy the species you share a space with.
Ultimately whether or not I have ruined this goose for you is personal, I can’t tell you what to think about the aesthetic value of non-native species, but I can encourage you to go look at cool geese, and go discover their history, even if it’s like checking out a celebrity’s tweets from 2010.