Can You Raise Reindeer on Goose Shit? Amazing Waterfowl Facts

I've just been reading about waterfowl all morning long. Which is fine, because waterfowl are among my favourite animals (as if that isn't obvious from my company... what, you mean it isn't obvious?). Entirely because they're on my mind at the moment, here is the first of several, entirely random waterfowl facts...

Geese are consummate herbivores, and should be regarded as the avian equivalents of grazing artiodactyls and perissodactyls...

Except that they can fly. And they're much smaller. And they can't digest cellulose (by which I mean: they lack a gut flora that breaks down cellulose). Rather than cropping vegetation with a specialised dentition, geese crop plants with a robust bill where the lamellae (typically soft and flexible) have become heavily keratinised tooth-like serrations [shown here, in a Tundra bean goose Anser serrirostris; picture by D. Naish]. In some species, the serrations are obvious in lateral view and form an area of the bill termed the 'grinning patch'. Unlike artiodactyls, geese don't utilise a multi-chambered stomach and caecum; instead, they simply rely on rapid transit of large quantities of fodder, quickly expelling unwanted fibre and maximising energy intake by selecting the most digestible parts of favoured plants. Geese of some species can spend as much as 41-46% of any given 24 hrs eating: in some species (like Barnacle geese Branta leucopsis [shown below; from wikipedia]) this increases to 62% when other, competing species (like Pinkfeet A. brachyrhynchus) are present (Madsen & Mortensen 2008). Some goose species have been reported to spend as much as 17 hrs out of every 24 eating (70% of the day) when they need to rapidly put weight on during winter, and White-fronted geese A. albifrons [one shown at very top; from wikipedia] will spend 90% of their active day foraging when food is scarce. Geese feed rapidly, pecking at rates of between 80 and 200 times per minute (Owen 1980). For comparison, bovids seem to eat for about 33-40% of any 24 hrs, and horses are reported to spend c. 50-66% of a 24 hour period eating.

Goose digestive efficiency is very low compared to that of many other vertebrate herbivores: as mentioned above, they can't digest cellulose, and some species only absorb c. 25% of the nutriment available from the plants they eat. In fact, goose droppings still contain so much recoverable nutriment that some mammalian herbivores can meet all of their dietary needs by eating nothing but goose shit (van der Wal & Loonen 1998). White-fronted geese and Barnacle geese produce a dropping every 3.5 minutes during their active period, meaning that 140 dropping are produced over 8 hours of feeding. Each dropping weighs 0.7-1 g when dry (note: DRY). Because the geese also produce droppings on the roost after feeding in the evening, they are estimated to produce 150 droppings a day at least.

150 individual droppings seems like a lot, but I was interested in seeing how it compares to bodyweight. And 150 g of droppings for an animal weighing 1.7-2.4 kg or so isn't particularly high: it's 11-16% of bodyweight per day. Horses produce 15-23 kg of dung per day, and given average-ish weights of 380-550 kg, this amounts to c. 4% of bodyweight per day. Cows produce about 55 kg of dung per day, amounting to about 11% of bodyweight (assuming a cow of 500 kg) [however: see comments. I forgot that I'm comparing DRY WEIGHT of goose droppings vs WET WEIGHT of mammal droppings].

I must note that the amount of time that geese spend foraging, the amount of nutriment that geese absorb from their food, and the nutritive content of their droppings all varies hugely depending on where they are in their moult cycle (Fox & Kahlert 1999) [feeding Barnacle geese in Finland shown below; from wikipedia].

More amazing waterfowl facts soon!

Death by Toxic Goose. Amazing waterfowl facts

Hey: wouldn't it be weird if some waterfowl were poisonous? Yeah, wouldn't it. Well... guess what?


One of the most dangerous birds in the world - I'm not kidding here - is the African spur-winged goose Plectropterus gambensis [the adjacent painting - from wikipedia - is by Louis A. Fuertes, one of the greatest zoological artists of all time]. Weighing as much as 7 kg, this formidable bird (not a goose in the strict sense, but a member of the shelduck/sheldgoose clade Tadorninae*) bears sharp spurs on its wrists. The birds use these in attacking both other spur-winged geese, and other waterfowl (at least in captivity: a captive individual kept at Slimbridge maintained a territory on top of a small hill. Waterfowl of other species would sometimes climb the hill, get attacked, and die from their injuries). It's quite plausibly dangerous to people, but I can't find any explicit statements on that [in the stuffed specimen shown below - from Scientific-web - the wing spur is visible at the wrist joint].

* Its superficial similarity to the Australasian Magpie-goose Anseranas semipalmata meant that it was once classified alongside this species. It was also thought intermediate between screamers and anatids during the 1860s, and affinities with true geese have been suggested at times.

Anyway... as if this isn't bad enough, members of this species can sometimes be poisonous. But I don't mean that they can inject venom with their wing-spurs, or anything like that. Rather, some populations (those in the Gambia) feed on a poisonous beetle (specifically, a member of the blister beetle group (Meloidae)), and then sequester the beetle's poison into their own tissues (Bartram & Boland 2001). Blister beetles are well known for producing the toxin cantharidin, small amounts of which (as little as 10 milligrams) cause death in humans. The effect of cantharidin on the urinary tract (it results in swelling of the genitalia) means that people have been using it as an aphrodisiac for centuries; the Spanish fly Lytta vesicatori is a blister beetle. So the result of blister beetle ingestion by spur-winged geese is that their flesh is toxic. Eating one can - apparently - result in death (Wanless 2001) [Plectropterus in flight shown below].

While the poisonous tissues of several passerines - notably the various pitohuis, the Ifrita Ifrita coronata and the Rufous shrike-thrush Colluricincla megarhyncha of New Guinea - is now quite well known (this was covered on Tet Zoo back in 2008), they aren't alone and several other birds are also known to sequester toxins from various animal and/or plant prey. Quail Coturnix coturnix are known to be toxic when on migration, but only certain populations are, and only on part of their migratory journey (e.g., those flying from west Africa to Europe are toxic; those going from eastern Africa to Europe aren't toxic, but are when they return to Africa in the Autumn). Being poisoned by quail even has a name (coturnism): there are accounts of it in the Bible, and it was so common in the Roman Empire that the eating of quails was banned in the 1st century (Bartram & Boland 2001).