Animal · Iceland, Norway, Sweden
Greylag goose
Anser anser — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The greylag goose is the ancestor of nearly every farmyard goose, and it taught science something that changed how we think about growing up.
Picture credit: NorbertNagel (CC BY-SA 4.0) · H005 (Public domain) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the greylag goose live?
Home: Moors, marshes, lakes and coastal islands.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Russia, China.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: 74–91 cm long, wingspan 147–180 cm. It weighs about 3.3 kilograms. On the menu: plants.
The story behind it
In the first hours after a gosling hatches, it fixes on whatever moves nearby and treats it as its mother — for good. The Austrian researcher Konrad Lorenz found this out with greylag geese, and the famous pictures of a man walking across a meadow with a line of goslings behind him are exactly that: birds that had seen him first. Lorenz called it imprinting, and it is not learning in the ordinary sense. It happens in a narrow window, it happens once, and it cannot be undone. In the wild the window is enough, because the first moving thing a gosling sees really is its mother. Greylags have been living close to people for a very long time: they were already kept as farm birds by at least 1360 BCE, which makes them one of the oldest domestic animals of all.
Find it on the globe
Greylag goose is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
What is imprinting?
A gosling decides in its first hours who its mother is, based on what moves nearby. It happens once, inside a short window, and it cannot be undone — which is why goslings followed Konrad Lorenz.
Is a greylag goose the same as a farmyard goose?
Nearly every farmyard goose descends from it. Thousands of years of keeping made the farm birds heavier, often white, and poor at flying. The wild bird is grey-brown and migrates.
Why do geese fly in a V?
Each bird flies slightly beside and behind the one in front, out of its downwash and inside the rising air off its wingtip. The leader has the hardest job, so the birds take turns.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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