A population of Arctic geese has broken with tradition and adopted brand new breeding grounds and migration routes, bringing hope that some wildlife, at least, is able to respond rapidly to changing Arctic conditions.
For 35 years, biologists led by Jesper Madsen of Denmark’s Aarhus University have been tagging the pink-footed geese that traditionally breed on the Norwegian islands of Svalbard and over-winter in Denmark.
The team reports in Current Biology that thousands of these birds have now shifted their breeding grounds 1000km to the east, to the Russian islands of Novaya Zemlya, changing their migration routes south accordingly.
“Thirty years ago we were told that geese are very traditional, going back to the same sites year after year, and that you can set the clock by when they arrive and depart,” says Madsen. “But we have seen this change develop in 10 to 15 years, from a few dozen birds to four to six thousand.”
Increased competition with barnacle geese at feeding stops on migration has made it hard for the pink-footeds to fatten up for breeding, says Madsen. “This is a case of flock-living social animals having a mechanism to escape very quickly from conditions that are no longer helpful.”
But how did the geese find Novaya Zemlya? Madsen suspects that the first settlers followed Taiga bean geese heading there when their migratory paths crossed. “Perhaps they just jumped on the train to see where it takes them,” he says. “They now take exactly the same route, with the same timing, as the bean geese.”
Main image: Pink-footed geese © Education Images/Universal Images Group/Getty Images