Rare taiga bean goose with transmitter in the Netherlands

This video from the Netherlands says about itself:

Taiga Bean Goose – Anser fabalis fabalis

Video of 8 birds in Heteren on 25-1-2011.

Translated from the Dutch Sovon ornithologists:

Rare taiga bean goose with transmitter in the Netherlands

Friday, January 9th, 2015

In the Netherlands last winter only scores of taiga bean geese overwintered. Only in North Brabant province there is still a traditional wintering spot, and a bird provided with a transmitter in Denmark flew right there. Internationally there is concern about these large, elegant bean geese with their yellow beaks.

On December 30, Danish researchers saw a signal of a taiga bean goose with a transmitter come from the Netherlands. It was a bird that was captured along with 48 fellow geese on 14 November in Jutland in northern Denmark. The goose, with a GSM transmitter around the neck, appeared to be heading straight for North Brabant: the last permanent place of wintering taiga been geese in the Netherlands.

In the area of Helvoirt this bird resides now in a group of 14 geese, along with three birds with collars that were caught in the same place in Jutland. From elsewhere in the Netherlands there are now no sightings of this species, which is revealing: this goose, once so common in some winters (called ‘yellow beak’ by connoisseurs) has become rare with us. During severe winters in the seventies and eighties, there were sometimes still counted more than 20,000 of them in the Netherlands. In the past five winters numbers ranged between approximately 300 and 60 individuals. Most taiga bean geese have stopped going south any further than Sweden.

Tundra bean geese wintering in Drenthe province: here.

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