Appendix 
A Speciric NoTE oN THE WILD-GEESE OF SPAIN 
Tue Greylag Goose (Anser cinereus) is the only species we need here consider. 
For of the many hundreds of wild-geese that we have shot and examined 
during the eighteen years since the publication of Wild Spain, every one has 
proved to bea Greylag. This is the more remarkable inasmuch as an allied 
form, the Bean-Goose, was supposed in earlier days to occur in Spain, though 
relatively in small numbers. Col. Irby estimated the Bean-Geese as one to 
200 of the Greylags; but no such proportion any longer exists, at least 
in the delta of the Guadalquivir, where, during eighteen years, hardly a single 
Bean-Goose has been obtained.? 
This abandonment of southern Spain by the Bean-Goose (presuming it 
was ever found therein) appears inexplicable. The species has lately been 
recognised as divisible into various races or subspecies (differing chiefly in 
the form and colour of the beak),? for which reason it may here be recorded 
that of the few Bean-Geese examined twenty years ago in Spain, the beak 
was invariably dark to below the nasal orifice, with a dark tip, and an inter- 
mediate band of rufous-chestnut. 
Of the other three members of the genus, the Pink-footed Goose (Anser 
brachyrhynchus) has never occurred in Spain ; while neither the white-fronted nor 
the lesser white-fronted species (A. albifrons and A. erythropus, L.) have ever 
been recorded save in an isolated instance in either case. We have never 
met with any one of them—indeed, the only wild-goose in our records, other 
than Greylag and half-a-dozen Bean-Geese, is a single Bernacle (Bernicla leucopsis), 
one of three that was shot at Santolalla by our late friend Mr. William Garvey. 
Of the Greylags that winter in Andalucia, the great majority are adults— 
that is (presuming our diagnosis to be correct), scarcely one in four is a gosling 
of the year. The adult geese we distinguish by the spur on the wing-point of 
the ganders and generally by their larger size and heavier build. Their under- 
sides, moreover, are more or less spotted or barred with black—some wear 
regular “barred waistcoats,” whereas the young birds are wholly plain white 
beneath. The legs and feet of the latter are also of the palest flesh-colour 
(some almost white), rarely showing any approximation to a pink shade, and 
their beaks vary from nearly white to palest yellow; whereas in the older, 
mostly “spot-breasted,” geese the beak is deep yellow to orange, and their 
legs and feet are distinctly pink—some as pronouncedly so as in A. brachy- 
1 We find a note that one Bean-Goose was shot on November 27, 1896—weight 5} Ibs. 
% See the elaborate monograph on The Geese of Europe and Asia, by M. Serge Alphéraky 
of St. Petersburg (London, Rowland Ward). 
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