Like many migratory birds, barnacle geese winter in separate areas from where they breed. There are several different populations that are scattered across the arctic, here are the major ones we know of so far:

• The Eastern Greenland population has about 40,000 birds. They winter on the Hebrides of western Scotland and in western Ireland and breed near the coast of Greenland.
• The Svalbard population has around 24,000 birds who winter on the Solway Firth on the England/Scotland border and breed on Svalbard.
• The Novaya Zemla population is the largest with around 130,000 birds. They breed on the Russian island Novaya Zemla and winter in the Netherlands.
• A new fourth population, derived from the Novaya Zemlya population, has become established since 1975 breeding on the islands and coasts of the Baltic Sea and wintering in the Netherlands. Population about 8,000.

Barnacle geese are found in and around coastal mudflats, wet meadows, the upper parts of fjords, and marshes in the arctic tundra.

Barnacle geese are mostly vegetarian. During the summer, they feed on grasses and young shoots and seeds. When the winter rolls around, and grasses are less abundant, they will move into the coastal mud flats to feed on seaweed, mollusks, and other aquatic invertebrates.

At the end of August and September, each separate population begins migrating to their breeding grounds to form colonies to provide safety in numbers.

Once they arrive, every bird will pair up with a mate. They begin courting each other by leaping, flapping their wings, and vocalizing together. Once they find a suitable partner, they can stay with them for life.

They will begin building a nest high in the cliffs or sometimes even on the arctic floor. Each strategy has its risks; the high cliff nests are far from food, so the infants must jump. The low nests are close to food, but are at risk from predators. Life seems unfair for the geese. Yet the population is thriving as many still make it to adulthood.

The parents build the nest with surrounding plant material and down feathers they pull from their own bodies. Once the nest is built the female lays 3 to 5 eggs. She will incubate the eggs for around 25 days while the male watches over until they hatch, then they will all stay together as a family during migration and wintering.

Geese have what is known as precocial young, which means they are born alert and ready to move under their own power and can feed themselves. So once the goslings hatch, they are ready to go out into the world.

The death-defying leap young goslings must make to leave the nest just days after hatching.  It seems impossible that any make it out alive, but miraculously they do. Barnacle geese choose to nest high in cliffs and rocky outcroppings because it has obvious survival advantages when escaping predators. As there are no trees anywhere for miles and unhatched eggs are an easy and welcome treat to any hungry polar bear or arctic fox.

This also means the nests are far away from any food, and like all geese, barnacle geese do not bring food to their young. So soon after hatching, the babies have to make a choice: go hungry or jump.  It is a feat that can only be appreciated by watching it yourself! Many young do not make it, but for the ones that do, you can’t help but admire their resilience and bravery!

As mentioned before, they have to leave the nest because the parents cannot bring them food. This is when they must make the astonishing jump.

If they make it down successfully or survive any predators, in about 45 days they can fly on their own. They will fly to their wintering grounds to graze on young grasses to prepare for the breeding season next year. If they are successful, they will come back for many more seasons to come, as they can live up to 25 years! 

Where did the name come from? It started because barnacle geese have always nested far away from human settlements. Because of this, the people of 12th century Scotland and Europe never witnessed the birds reproduce, and never saw any young goslings. Naturally, they assumed this meant they spontaneously emerged from the earth, but more specifically from a species of barnacle often found washed up attached to logs and debris.

During this era, Bishop Gerald of Wales published a book Topographia Hiberniae. In it, he described how Irish churchmen would eat the barnacle geese during fasts because “these birds [are] not flesh nor being born of the flesh”, for “they are born at first like pieces of gum on logs of timber washed by the waves. Then enclosed in shells of a free form they hang by their beaks as if from the moss clinging to the wood and so at length in process of time obtaining a sure covering of feathers, they either dive off into the waters or fly away into free air. . . I have myself seen many times with my own eyes more than a thousand minute corpuscles of this kind of bird hanging to one log on the shore of the sea, enclosed in shells and already formed”. And so the myth was born, and the name has stuck ever since.