There are times that I forget I am not the only migrant from the Scottish Highlands to end up in Iceland. Yesterday we spotted a greylag goose in one of our eider ponds at the Skalanes Reserve. This in itself is interesting but not unique as we have quite a few breeding pairs of greylag on the reserve. What made this greylag different from all the others was the orange neck ring that it had on.
A couple of emails and a spot of investigation later and we discovered that our Orange ringed greylag had been rung as part of a joint project by the Wildfowl & Wetland Trust (WWT), the Icelandic Institute of Natural History and the Highland Ringing Group.
The bird was rung on 08/01/2011 just outside Golspie in Sutherland and this was the first time it had been reported since that date. The amusing thing from our point of view was that both Izzy and myself were working as volunteer wardens with the RSPB at the Forsinard Reserve, not a million miles away when this bird was rung. Now we are all spending the summer in a rather cold and snowy Iceland.
As I mentioned, we have several pairs of greylags and this is the first one that has been spotted with a neck ring, so it is likely the awful weather has driven it from it´s nest site inland to a slightly better spot on the coast at the reserve.
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