Hybrid/Leucistic Egyptian Goose

This is very much a guess, pending any other ideas. I'd have thought this was an immature bird. If it's not, happy for my guess to be corrected.

At first I thought it was immature, but looking at pictures of immature egyptian geese, none have the greyish flight feathers and tail, or whitish head that this one does

I think its probably a leucistic bird due to the overall reduction in pigmentation (I could be wrong!)

Got to say that I am not convinced it is either leucistic or hybrid. I have very minimal knowledge re feral birds. Just done a quick search ‘grey morph Egyptian goose’. Two suggestions……still that it is immature…..a couple of photos, incl one from UK in March (same timeframe but different year). Not identical but similar. The other suggestion is it is a grey morph version. Have a look for Egyptian geese at oiseaux-birds.com and you will see similar photos there. Prob depends which is labelled right…….another bit of info, a book here states there are two morph incl ‘grey morph’ which is paler headed.

It is 100% not a juvenile. This bird has looked like this for over a year and I grew up around Egyptian geese of all ages and not one of them ever looked like this. My only familiarity with morphs is deliberate mimicry or gender-deceptive morphage in birds such as hawks so I'm afraid I can't speak to that. I've messaged an expert on morphs to see what he thinks but these people are all very busy and rarely have time to get back to every message so we shall see. The suspicion of leucism in this instance is based largely on the washed out pinions and the fact that it seems to have smaller extremities along with being generally smaller, which is very common in albinos. I don't know how common it is in leucistic individulas, though. I'm afraid my knowledge of colour genetics errs on the mammalian side. I'd love to learn more about bird colouration, however. This particular pond is a hotspot for unusual birds - a greylag/Canadian pair produce offspring here every year for several years now and this year one of the hybrids seems to be trying to breed too.

In reply to Rushin_Bushin:

Rushin_Bushin said:

It is 100% not a juvenile.

No one said it was. I think your response was to me. I said I know very little about feral/escaped/non native birds, but was guessing it may be an immature bird. i.e. sub adult.

Re being corrected, I am not fluent in Egyptian geese. If you've never seen one looking like this individual, I can also confirm I haven't knowingly either. BUT, that means there are mislabelled photos on the internet. May well be true, and certainly there are plenty! I said how to display examples in the prev post.

Re morph, as mentioned prev., the description in my book matches the photo. So does at least one photo I referred to prev.

Got to admit my opinion hasn't changed re it not being hybrid or leucistic.

In reply to ItisaRobbo:

I feel as if you felt I was arguing with you. I wasn't.

I say...

let's call them all Egyptian Shelducks!

Tadorna  fix it:)))

S

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