Lesser White-fronted Goose

A bit of fun with the photo here. At the bottom you have a group of birders watching the Lesser White-fronted Goose, at the top you have the best picture I could obtain of the alleged bird which was over 600m away. The definitive ID of a Lesser White-front would be the yellow ring round the eye!!

Today was the second day of our planned weekend "twitch". After yesterday's Great White Egret, today's target was the Yare Valley, wintering site of England's only Bean Goose flock as well as being a good site for (Greater) White-fronted Geese plus at present a very rare Lesser White-fronted Goose.

As we were heading in that direction, we stopped off in Lowestoft as there were a couple of reported rarities there. First call was at Leathes Ham, basically a lake in a park - but what a lake, an absolutely fabulous collection of duck, Pintail, Gadwall, Mallard, Wigeon, Teal, Pochard, Tufted, Shoveler and the reason for the visit 6 Scaup. Scaup are generally a duck that winters on our estuaries, so getting good close up views on this lake was quite unusual.

Next port of call was a beach car park in the north of Lowestoft and just sitting there as promised in a flock of a hundred Black-headed Gulls was a single First Winter Iceland Gull.

Now for the days main treat an exploration of the Yare Valley. As we arrived there were a few people leaving with tales that the Lesser White-front wasn't around - pity we thought. We got ourselves into a good position for looking over the marshes and scanned around, the nearest geese were maybe 400m away and we ticked off Bean Goose, (Greater) White-fronted Goose, Barnacle Goose & Greylag Goose. We'd been there over an hour, some birders had come and gone, some geese had come and gone, but then the chatter started about a single smallish White-front that was associating with the Bean Geese (correct behaviour), all telescopes were trained on it. Of course it did a good job of hiding behind divots & tussocks, only popping its head up occasionally. Eventually the consensus was the size was right, the white on its forehead was right and some even claimed to be able to see the definitive yellow ring round the eye.

There's nothing like a group of birders for convincing themselves that what they're looking at is what they want to be looking at. I certainly wouldn't have ID'd it myself, but over the past month this rare goose has had a lot of attention and it was definitely around somewhere and our candidate ticked the right boxes. So I'll tick the appropriate box in my Blue Peter Book of Birds, maybe I'll put brackets round the tick, or maybe I won't - such is the sad life of a birder.

RCB's gone for a safer tick, but he's really hoping Lawrie doesn't disapprove of him "really wanting to see some of the rarer gulls", anyway he's blipped the gull in the car park - an Iceland Gull.

Even in Large, you'll see no yellow ring, but at least you may be able to see which is the Lesser White-front (the furthest left goose, down and right of the gull).