“Richardson’s” Cackling Goose
On the first of May we left birding to Saari. It seemed to be pretty basic trip with no surprises. I got some new year-ticks: some Wood Sandpipers, Golden Plovers were in 2 places, 1 Spotted Redshank, 1 Little Ringed Plover and 1 Whimbrel were seen. But only better numbers were 83 Greenshanks in Pohjanranta and a couple of hundreds of Tundra Bean and White-fronted Geese in Suurenjärvenliete where also many ducks, some common waders and 2 Hazel Hens were seen.
We were already on our last place in Honkakylä, Kanavalampi where a plane flushed a flock of geese from the back-fields. They flew straight towards us and I noticed a small Canada Goose on the flick – a Cackling Goose again! The flock landed in front of us and we could start studying the strange goose and realized that this time it was not a minima but a hutchinsii type. It seems that this race might be very potential tick in the future so after we had called Jarmo Pirhonen who we had just met and he had agreed with us that the bird looked like a hutchinsii – “Richardson’s” Cackling Goose, we drove home to put the pictures here to our blog.
There will be lots of twitchers as hutchinsii has never been accepted by Finnish rarity committee. It seems that I keep on finding these Cackling Geese as we had found one small Canada goose or Cackling Goose years ago (1998) in Lumijoki and already 1 minima together with Hanna and 1 minima alone.
J.A.