Greylag Goose

The Greylag Goose is a big, heavily built grey-brown goose with a heavy orange bill and pink legs, the wild bird from which Europe's farmyard geese are descended. In Britain it lives all year, from the islands of north-west Scotland to park lakes and gravel pits in the south, and more arrive from Iceland every winter. In American spelling it is the Graylag Goose.

It is the largest of the grey geese, with a large head and a thick neck. The body is a plain grey-brown, and the heavy bill has no black on it. Most show an orange, pinkish or yellowish ring round the eye, and some have black spots or blotches on the belly. In flight the very pale grey forewing stands out against the darker flight feathers.

Eastern birds belong to a second subspecies: paler and slightly larger, with a pink bill and eye ring. The two forms blend into each other in eastern Europe and western Russia, and bill colour varies in western birds too, most probably because eastern birds have been introduced there.

Greylags are 76-89 cm (30-35 in) long, with a wingspan of 147-180 cm (58-71 in). Live adults weighed by bird ringers in Britain and Ireland average 3.34 kg (7.4 lb), and most weigh between 2.8 and 3.9 kg (6.2-8.6 lb).¹ It is the biggest wild goose native to Britain, though the introduced Canada Goose is heavier.

The sexes look alike, but the gander, as the male is called, is the bigger bird: in the same ringing data, males average 3.49 kg (7.7 lb), females 3.18 kg (7.0 lb) and juveniles 2.92 kg (6.4 lb).¹

Young birds keep their juvenile plumage until their second winter. They look plainer and more mottled than adults, less neatly patterned on the back, never show black marks on the belly, and have paler bills and legs. Downy goslings are described under nesting.

Four other grey geese can look similar. The Pink-footed Goose, a winter visitor that does not breed in Britain, is smaller and more compact, with a dark brown head and neck, a short dark bill with a pink band and pink legs. It has a pale grey forewing too, so look at the head and bill rather than the wings.

The Taiga Bean Goose and Tundra Bean Goose are darker and browner, with dark heads, mainly black bills with an orange or yellow-orange band or base, and orange legs; on a Taiga Bean Goose the yellow-orange usually covers more than half the bill. In flight their wings show little contrast, with none of the Greylag's pale forewing, and their tails have a broad dark band.

Adult Greater White-fronted Geese have a white forehead and black bars across the belly. Young White-fronts lack both, so they are the ones to check: a Greylag is bigger and greyer, with a thicker bill, usually a pinkish to yellow ring round the eye and paler, more contrasting forewings. A little white at the base of the bill does not rule out a Greylag either: in a Swedish sample, 43% of adult Greylags had some.²

The Canada Goose, often seen with Greylags on park lakes, is easy to tell by its black head and long black neck with a white chinstrap. The two sometimes interbreed.

Europe's farmyard geese are domesticated Greylags. Genetic studies agree that the European domestic goose comes from the Greylag, while most Chinese breeds come from the Swan Goose; Darwin reported in 1868 that most judges of the day already held our geese to come from the Greylag.^{3, 4, 5}

When and where the goose was first tamed is not settled, and the sources disagree. The traditional view puts it in the eastern Mediterranean, possibly Egypt, in the third millennium BCE, and Egyptian paintings of the 18th Dynasty (about 1450-1341 BCE) suggest fully domestic geese by then; the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust gives a later date, saying domestic geese are thought to have first appeared about 3,000 years ago in Ancient Egypt; genetic estimates of the date differ widely, and they show that wild and tame geese have never fully parted, wild Greylag populations sampled across Eurasia carrying between 3.2% and 58% domestic ancestry.^{3, 4, 6}

In parks, wild-type Greylags often share the water with domestic geese and their crosses. Domestic birds can be bigger than wild ones, and some have white round the base of the bill, though not a White-front's black belly bars; a goose that matches none of the wild species is most likely a domestic breed or a cross, and these breed with each other and with wild geese. Greylags have also hybridised with many other wildfowl, including Canada and Barnacle Geese and, rarely, Mute Swans, and most hybrid geese are fertile.^{7, 8}

Greylags are noisy. The usual call is a loud, nasal honking, deeper, harsher and more cackling than other grey geese, and rather like many domestic geese. They call at rest and in flight.

Up to nine different calls have been described: soft contact notes within families and flocks, loud calls from a bird that has lost its mate and from flocks in flight, cackles as birds move off, a short, high alarm note, a rolling call given by a pair or many birds together, fast cackling by both birds of a pair in the triumph display, and a hiss, mostly from a female defending her nest.

The recordings on this page are flight calls from Normandy in France, where the birds were seen, and two British recordings in which the geese were heard but not seen: calls near Ely in Cambridgeshire and a flock calling in Norfolk.

You can see Greylags all year in much of Britain and Ireland. Look on lakes, lochs, reservoirs, gravel pits and park lakes, and on nearby farmland, pasture and stubble, where flocks graze; in winter flocks also use estuaries and coastal marshes. The wildest birds breed among the heather and islands of north-west Scotland and the Hebrides, and the biggest winter gatherings are in Scotland, above all on Orkney.

Bird Atlas 2007-11 found Greylags in 57% of the 10-km squares of Britain and Ireland in the breeding season and 64% in winter, and the breeding range has grown by about 720% since 1968-72.¹

Britain has three groups of Greylags. The first are native birds, the descendants of a population that survived in north-west Scotland and the Hebrides: this is Britain's only native breeding goose. Greylags once bred in the English fens, Lancashire and the Lake District, but no longer bred in England by the end of the 18th century, as Alfred Newton wrote in 1911, and by the early 1900s they bred only in the far north and west of Scotland.^{9, 10}

A 2012 review says persecution was perhaps the main cause of the Scottish decline: by the 1870s breeding was limited to the Uists, Harris and Lewis and a few places on the west mainland, and by the 1930s possibly no more than 500 birds were left; special protection from 1954, the reseeding of rough grazing from the 1970s and milder winters probably explain the recovery, to about 10,000 birds by 1997 and some 34,500 by 2008-09.¹¹

The second group descends from birds put out to restore the species. Greylags were introduced to south-west Scotland and East Anglia in the 1930s, and in the 1960s and 1970s wildfowlers released more than 1,300 more to bring the Greylag back as an English breeding bird; a 1988 study put the re-established birds in Britain and Ireland at about 1,700 in the late 1960s and some 13,000-14,000 by 1985-86.¹² Most came from eggs or birds of the native Scottish stock, so the 2012 review argues that they are a re-established native species, not feral birds; the two groups have long since met, and they are now treated as one British population.¹¹ Surveys in the summers of 2008 and 2009 estimated 47,405 Greylags in Scotland and about 84,500 in Britain, with numbers in the north-west growing about 11.7% a year since 1997.¹³

The third group are winter visitors from Iceland. They leave in late September, most arrive in mid to late October, and they fly straight back in early April. Northern Britain holds most of them in winter; smaller numbers go to Ireland, the Faroes and south-west Norway, and some stay in Iceland.¹⁴ A 2007 ringing study found almost the whole population wintering in Britain and most birds returning to the same region each winter.¹⁵ Their winter range has moved north: by 2008/09 about 60% wintered on Orkney, and a 2023 NatureScot report put Orkney's numbers at some 20,000 resident Greylags in summer and 40,000-50,000 Icelandic birds in winter.^{16, 17} In Ireland, Icelandic birds are present from November to April at a few sites, while resident birds live there all year.

British-bred Greylags mostly stay put, though young birds ringed on Orkney have turned up in Norfolk, 787 km (489 miles) away. The travellers are the Icelandic birds, and ringing shows the link: Greylags ringed in Britain and Ireland have been reported from Iceland 852 times, an adult male ringed in the Highlands on 7 April 1993 was in Iceland nine days later, 1,138 km (707 miles) away, and a few continental Greylags reach Britain too, from Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands and Spain.¹⁸

On the continent, Greylags now migrate less far than they did: a south Swedish population that mostly wintered in southern Spain in the 1980s now winters about ten degrees of latitude further north.¹⁹

Greylags are grazers and eat almost nothing but plants: grass, roots, leaves, stems, shoots and seed heads, with spilt grain, potatoes and other vegetables in winter. They feed mostly on land, sometimes upending or dipping their heads in water, and they probe mud and tug at roots. They feed mainly by day.

In winter few British Greylags live on natural foods: gut analyses published in 1974 found mainly grass and spilt cereal; in north-east Scotland flocks took cereal stubbles in autumn and moved on to grass later, flying a median 10.7 km (6.6 miles) from their roost to feed, against 4 km (2.5 miles) for Pink-footed Geese; and on Tiree they fed mainly on silage fields and improved pasture.^{20, 21, 22}

Moulting Greylags on Saltholm, Denmark, regraze patches of saltmarsh grass sooner than would give them the most food per visit, which suggests they are fitting in as many harvests as they can while they cannot fly.⁷

Because they feed on farmland, Greylags share fields with farmers, and how much they take has been measured in a few places. At a Greylag site near Castle Douglas in south-west Scotland, the potential maximum loss of spring grass to winter grazing averaged 1.51 tonnes of dry matter per hectare in 1974-76, at one site over two winters.²³ In north-east Scotland grain yields were lower where geese grazed in some, though not all, wheat and barley fields, and some fields were grazed too lightly to cost any yield; that study covered Greylags and Pink-footed Geese together.²⁴ In the Netherlands, more Greylag grazing did not always mean more damage: the study found both positive and negative links between grazing pressure and the damage inspectors assessed.²⁵

Birds of the World, in a text of 2016, says the species often comes into conflict with farmers even where geese are few, as on the Uists.⁷ Scotland's national goose policy, which weighs farming against conservation, is described under conservation.

In the UK the first eggs are laid in late March or early April, and most in mid-April; Icelandic and continental birds start later. Pairs nest on the ground, often on islands in lochs, lakes and gravel pits, in reedbeds and, in Scotland, in tall heather, sometimes in loose colonies near good feeding. A few nest in trees: notes in British Birds record one about 18 m (60 ft) up a pine 1 km (0.6 miles) from water, and in Sweden tree nesting, including in old Osprey nests, appears to be increasing.⁷

The female builds the nest, a wide, low pile of grass and reed stems with a down lining, 80-110 cm (31-43 in) across.

She usually lays 4-6 creamy-white eggs, sometimes 3-12, a day apart; the BTO's handbook figure is 5-7, and on the Uists clutches averaged 4.4 and 3.7 eggs on North Uist in 1986 and 1987, against 5.8 and 5.2 on South Uist, perhaps because more young birds were breeding on North Uist as numbers grew.^{7, 1, 26}

Only the female incubates, from the last egg, for 27-28 days by the handbook figures, while the gander stands guard nearby. In Galloway, 20 eggs timed one by one each took exactly 29 days.²⁷

The goslings hatch together and soon leave the nest; families soon gather into bigger groups, and the young fly at about 50-60 days. Goslings are covered in brownish-olive down above and yellow below, with dark bills and dark grey legs, and weigh about 113 g (4 oz) on average, against 127 g (4.5 oz) in Galloway, where broods averaged 4.1 young in July from a mean clutch of 5.1.^{7, 27}

Families stay together into the winter. On Tiree, goslings stayed with their parents until early April, and in a semi-tame flock in Austria young geese stayed with them a year or longer, losing fewer fights when their relatives backed them up.^{22, 28} In south Sweden goslings in bigger broods survived better, and parents raising more than eight young showed no cost the next year.²⁹

Often, but not always. Greylags form long-term pairs. Most first breed at three, sometimes two, though strong pair bonds usually form at three to five. In a south Swedish population about one pair in ten split up each year, and 29.7% of pairs ended in divorce.³⁰ In a free-flying research flock at Grünau in Austria, pair bonds lasted four years on average and up to 17, most ended when a partner died, and male-male pairs were fairly frequent.⁷

Outside the breeding season Greylags are sociable, living in family groups and flocks, often alongside other grey geese. Nesting pairs can be very territorial, driving other geese and big birds off, and a sitting female will hiss to defend her nest; once the goslings hatch they grow sociable again, and several families sometimes join up. Re-established birds on park lakes are often tame.

In a study with heart-rate transmitters, three free-ranging ganders' hearts beat about 40 times a minute at rest and over 400 at take-off, and almost as fast during social encounters with other geese.³¹

Pairs and families keep together with a ritual Konrad Lorenz called the triumph ceremony. The gander charges, or pretends to charge, another goose while giving a rolling call, then goes back to his mate, the call fading into soft cackling, and the pair cackle together. Lorenz saw the ceremony as the glue of the pair or family, marking it off from other groups.³²

Greylags are the geese of Konrad Lorenz's imprinting studies. In 1935, with an English summary in 1937, he described how hand-reared birds, notably Greylag goslings, follow whatever moves away from them after hatching and direct their social behaviour at their human keeper. He found that this imprinting happens in a short early window, and thought it could not be reversed. In 1936 a gosling put with a turkey hen for two weeks still left her to follow him. One thing, he thought, a human probably could not supply: the grey wing pattern of a flying goose, which he believed sets off following in flight.³³

While they moult their flight feathers in summer, Greylags cannot fly for a time. British birds mostly moult near where they breed, but non-breeders gather at moulting sites such as Loch Loyal and Loch Leven, and moulting adults at Windermere came mainly from Lancashire, Yorkshire and Cumbria, a mean 83.3 km (52 miles) away.^{10, 34}

A Greylag that reaches breeding age, at three, typically lives about 8 years, the BTO's estimate from an adult survival rate of 0.83 a year.¹ Some live far longer.

The oldest on the BTO's longevity list for Britain and Ireland was ringed as a first-year bird at North Duffield, near Selby in North Yorkshire, on 5 July 2004, and shot at Heslington, York, 13 km (8 miles) away, on 2 September 2024: 20 years, 1 month and 28 days after it was ringed.³⁵

On the European list the oldest is a German-ringed bird of 27 years 4 months, also shot; EURING gives a bird ringed full-grown an estimated minimum age, counted from 1 July of its ringing year, while the British list gives the time since ringing.³⁶

Birds of the World gives more than 18 years in the wild in the UK and about 26 years in captivity, and a captive bird of 31 years appears in a 1938 compilation.^{7, 37}

White-tailed and Golden Eagles take adult Greylags. At the nest, in a Danish reedbed study 34% of clutches hatched, birds (probably mainly crows) took eggs at one site, and mammal predators included foxes, American mink and/or polecats.⁷ In Galloway, by contrast, 143 of 147 nests checked hatched at least one egg, and the fox appeared to be the only natural predator of the adults.²⁷

No. Greylags are common in Britain: about 47,000 pairs breed in the UK (2013-17) and around 230,000 birds winter here (2012/13 to 2016/17), the winter figure counting all three groups together; they are of Least Concern worldwide and in Europe, where 797,000-975,000 spend the winter.^{38, 39, 40}

They are Amber-listed in the UK, as in every assessment since 1996, but not for any decline: the listing rests on the wintering birds, more than half of which gather at ten or fewer sites, with the UK holding at least 20% of the European wintering population; Ireland lists the Greylag as Amber for the same localised wintering.^{41, 42}

The Breeding Bird Survey shows UK breeding-season numbers up 221% from 1995 to 2024, a significant rise, though the 18% rise over the last ten years is not statistically significant; in England alone the ten-year rise of 20% is.⁴³ The waterways surveys, the headline series for this bird, show a 542% rise over the 27 years to 2020, though the BTO says there is little good evidence on what drove the rise.^{44, 1}

The Wetland Bird Survey and the Icelandic goose census track the two populations separately. British and Irish Greylags rose 120% over 25 years (1998/99 to 2023/24) and 19% over ten, but Icelandic Greylags fell 30% and 44%, and their index is now the lowest since 1965/66. The November 2024 census put the Icelandic population at 46,773 birds, 15% fewer than a year before, a count made harder as British birds move into the Icelandic birds' wintering areas; under the African-Eurasian waterbird agreement (AEWA) it is listed as a population of 25,000-100,000 birds in long-term and rapid recent decline.^{45, 46}

Resident numbers have risen especially steeply on some Scottish islands. On Orkney, where Greylags were introduced in the 1980s, perhaps joined by birds from mainland Scotland and Icelandic birds that stopped short, an estimated 1,500 in 2001 rose to a peak August count of 22,911 in 2014, and about 24,000 by 2022.^{47, 48, 49} In Ireland about 3,118 Icelandic birds (2018/19) and 6,780 resident birds (2018-2023) have been counted, some of the residents coming from geese that wildfowlers released during the 20th century.¹⁴

Since 2000 Scotland has run a national goose policy that weighs farming against conservation, and from 2012 to 2017 four local pilots for resident Greylags, on Orkney, the Uists, Tiree and Coll, and Lewis and Harris, set out to test whether local numbers could be held at levels that lessen the impact on farming while keeping the species' conservation status.^{50, 48} The 2018 review of the pilots found that they did not demonstrate a reduction in agricultural damage, and by 2022 resident numbers at all four sites were higher again than in 2017.^{49, 48}

Yes: the law allows it in an open season. In Great Britain the Greylag is on Schedule 2 Part I of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, the list of birds the Act allows to be killed or taken in an open season. That season runs from 1 September to 31 January, and below the high-water mark of ordinary spring tides it runs on to 20 February; in Scotland no Greylag may be killed or taken on a Sunday or Christmas Day. The exception covers the bird only: its nest in use and its eggs stay protected.^{51, 52} In the Outer Hebrides, Caithness, Sutherland and Wester Ross, once strongholds of the native birds, offences in the close season carry special penalties, and a 2026 consultation on the quarry list proposed no change for the Greylag.^{53, 49, 54}

Scotland's 2026 general licence GL02 also covers it for preventing serious damage to crops and livestock feed, including in July and August; no 2026 general licence covers wild Greylags in England, Wales or Northern Ireland, and Wales' GL010 names it only for the sale of live captive-bred birds.^{55, 56}

In Northern Ireland it is a quarry species from 1 September to 31 January, but not on Sundays, nor between an hour after sunset and an hour before sunrise. In the Republic of Ireland the open season runs from 1 September to 15 October nationally, which falls before most Icelandic birds arrive, and on to 31 January only at Lady's Island in Wexford and the Gearagh in Cork.^{57, 58, 14}

Under the EU Birds Directive it is listed in Annex II Part A and Annex III Part B, and it is on Appendix III of the Bern Convention; lead shot may no longer be used for any goose in England or Wales, and across Great Britain it is not to be used or sold after 1 April 2029.^{59, 60, 61}