Martin Cassidy wrote:

What is a Lesser Canada Goose? I've seen references to same on Tweeters
and other lists occasionally, and saw what I would call a "lesser" this
last weekend. NGS doesn't help much, basically referring to a few
smaller-stature
subspecies. If I saw these in the Vancouver Island/Puget Sound area, what
would they be called?
=====
"Lesser" Canada Geese are Branta canadensis parvipes, which breed in
northern North America from central Alaska all the way east to the Melville
Peninsula, Northwest Territories, Canada, and from the Arctic Ocean south
to the northern parts of BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. They
winter widely in western U.S., east as far as Louisiana (not sure how far
north in the Mississippi Valley). They are probably the most abundant
subspecies of Canada Goose in Washington, really abundant in migration in
the Columbia Basin and common on the outer coast, less common inbetween.
Small numbers winter. This is a light subspecies, about the color of our
resident Branta canadensis moffitti, but much smaller.

The biggest confusion would be between this and the "Dusky" Canada Geese,
now considered two distinct subspecies B. c. fulva and B. c. occidentalis,
that breed coastally in southern AK and BC and migrate south along our
coast, some wintering in the sw part of the state. They are about the same
size as parvipes but much darker-bodied. Referring to the NGS guide,
parvipes would be the color of canadensis and the size of occidentalis.

There is so much one can learn about birds. I wish I could plug my
knowledge, gained from 45 years of intense interest in them, into a
computer that would answer questions for anyone interested. Or that there
were several encyclopedic volumes that would do it. Of course, there is
more than enough published to answer many orders of magnitude times the
volume of questions that come over tweeters, but most birders don't (and
certainly can't afford to) own this literature. The field guides of today
just scratch the surface, as do books like The Birder's Handbook. The
information gap is massive, so much so that some days I'm sad there isn't a
better way to transmit more info to more people who might want it.
Interestingly, there's also a real information turnover, in the sense that
stuff people considered important 20 or 40 years ago has been replaced by
other stuff--not necessarily more important stuff but perhaps more in
vogue. Birding and ornithology aren't that different from the fashion
world, believe it or not.

Apropos of this, if any of you subscribe to the journal Western Birds, read
the very valuable account in there of 50 years of California ornithology
since Grinnell and Miller. Also, if you are into finding rare birds and
sometimes frustrated about submitting reports of them to your friendly bird
record committee, read the introduction to the report of the California
Bird Records Commitee in there!

And, finally, some references that *do* have a lot of info about birds. If
you had them all, you'd be able to answer a whole lot of questions. The
first three are encyclopedic (entries in alphabetical order). The next two
are ornithology texts. The Birder's Handbook is a standard, and I think
the essays are a lot more valuable part of it than the species accounts.
If you *really* want to learn a lot, try the Arthur Cleveland Bent
life-history series; they knew a lot about birds back then that you don't
even find in bird books nowadays.

The Audubon Society Encyclopedia of North American Birds, by J. K. Terres.
Alfred A. Knopf, 1980.

A Dictionary of Birds, by B. Campbell and E. Lack, eds. Buteo Books, 1985.

The Birdwatcher's Companion, by C. Leahy. Hill and Wang, 1982.

The Life of Birds, by J. C. Welty and L. Baptista. Saunders College
Publishing, 1988.

Ornithology, by F. B. Gill. W. H. Freeman & Co., 1990.

Bird Behavior, by R. Burton. Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.

The Birder's Handbook: A Field Guide to the Natural History of North
American Birds, by P. R. Ehrlich, D. S. Dobkin, and D. Wheye. Simon &
Schuster, 1988.

Dennis Paulson phone: (206) 756-3798
Slater Museum of Natural History fax: (206) 756-3352
University of Puget Sound e-mail: dpaulson at ups.edu
Tacoma, WA 98416