This guy showed up along the business parkway where I work. He (she?) was quite uncooperative about letting me get a good photo of the letters (XW46).
I had a heck of a time finding any information on the goose collar and i learned a lot about the Canada goose along the way.
It’s mind-boggling to me. I thought there were just Canada geese. Then I learned there are dusky Canada geese. I finally saw them last winter, but they’ve not been back that I know of and I never had my camera handy.
Apparently, we also have cackling geese. They are shorter birds with a lighter neck base and a shorter neck.
If you read the articles (or at least look at the photos on the links), you’ll see the subspecies break down even further. I am beginning to think I need to take a whole lot of photos of the geese around the business park and see how many cackling geese vs. western Canada geese we have. And maybe some of those are light-phase Dusky Canada geese.
It makes my head hurt.
I learned about the collars, too: they are color coded for the subspecies. Dusky Canada geese get a red collar, cackling geese get a yellow collar with only 3 digits (shorter necks), Lesser Canada geese get a blue collar and western Canada geese get a white collar with four digits.
Guess I know what the neck collar on my goose means.
It is a western Canada goose.
The collar looks ungainly, but the goose doesn’t seem to notice it. I was hoping I could find a place where I could report my goose collar sighting and thus learn some of the history of the bird, but I haven’t located anything yet.
I remember finding a dead deer with a radio collar up in the woods. Don & I removed the collar (the deer was a skeleton, mostly) and sent it back to the Dept. of Fish & Wildlife. In turn, they sent me a summary of the deer’s entire life according to her radio collar. I was fascinated to learn she never traveled more than a mile in her entire lifetime!
So I was hoping to find something like that about the goose. Even though I haven’t been able to punch in its numbers and get a story, I don’t count it a loss. I just learned so much about Canada geese that I never knew!
Who would’a thunk it?
Jaci Dawn 
Neat!
From my old work notebook: (as of Jan 2007)
For Banded Birds contact: The USGS Patuxent Wildlife Center.
(the phone number isn’t any good…)
So I looked it up, and came up with:
Auxiliary bands (aka color and others) use their web-report:
http://www.pwrc.usgs.gov/BBL/homepage/recwobnd.cfm
It used to be the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
I checked and this is a good website…….
Does that help?
YOU ROCK! Terry! I was able to enter all the data I knew about the goose at that website. now I hope they email me back.I will keep everyone updated when I get info on my goose. Too cool…
Should be really interesting! Looking forward to that.
Found a flock of Canadian geese in Scottsdale, Arizona and I was trying to find out if there was any way I could help give information for a goose I saw with the tag E36. Unfortunately it was limping.
And “Oh Shit” as I (of course) don’t remember who I emailed to learn about my goose. Not that they told me much. My first suggestion is to call your local Fish & Wildlife. And IF I can remember who I reported my goose to, I will email you, Joseph. They weren’t very helpful – I will warn you of that.
Sad that your goose was limping – hope it just landed wrong and it was a small sprain.
Nope _ I did not save my emails. 😦 Damn. Another resource to try might be Cornell University. There are several links – just search Cornell University Birds. I usually go to AllAboutBirds.
Sorry I am NO help – and dangnabit!@ I should have saved my goose emails!! But they were so unhelpful…