High-flying goose raises the bar

ABAR-HEADED goose visits our local estuary. It hangs out with swans, gorging itself on stale bread offered by local children.

This goose doesn’t occur in Ireland; our visitor is an escapee from a wildfowl collection. It’s of no interest, therefore, to the bird-watching fraternity, which is a pity because the bar-head is one of the world’s most extraordinary birds.

This ornamental fowl is a familiar resident of city parks and ponds. The plumage is grey and white, with a black bar across the crown and another around the back of the neck. Bar-heads hit the headlines during the last H5N1 bird flu scare; they allegedly carried the lethal flu virus from the crowded farmsteads of south-east Asia to eastern Europe.