diet Flashcards
They eat mainly plants, including smartweed, grasses, swamp timothy, amaranth, sedges, bindweed, and nightshade. They also eat many agricultural crops including sorghum, millet, corn, rice, and wheat. They eat a smaller amount of aquatic animals such as snails, insects, and spiders. They typically forage at night, leaving roosts at sunset to fly to foraging areas. They feed in fields or by dabbling in shallow ponds.
Black-bellied Whistling-Duck
They eat mostly invertebrates and the seeds of aquatic plants. They forage by swimming or wading in shallow water and dabbling, tipping up, or diving to reach food with the bill. Where insects are present on vegetation or on the water’s surface, they sometimes glean or pick them with the bill. Both this species and Black-bellied Whistling-Ducks graze on vegetation, but they are more often filter-feeders, foraging by touch and straining fine mud through the bill to extract seeds and invertebrates. In rice-growing areas, where some farmers consider them pests, these whistling-ducks feed mostly in fields that have been seeded when flooded rather than when dry. In addition to rice seed, they eat green algae and seeds of wheat, knotgrass, switchgrasses, sedges (many species, including beakrush and fringe-rush), jungle-rice, bahiagrasses, darnel ryegrass, reed canary grass, signalgrass, watershield, cape blue waterlily, blue mudplantain, knotweed, robust marshwort, spearwort, Colombian waxweed, slender fimbry, and sea ragwood. Invertebrates such as earthworms, midges, water beetles, dragonfly larvae, snails, and small mollusks make up a small part of the diet for adults, perhaps a larger portion for ducklings.
Fulvous Whistling-Duck
They eat mostly marine invertebrates and plant matter. They forage for mussels and barnacles in shallow water, tipping up to grasp (or pry) them from rocks or from the sea floor. When feeding on plants, they graze on shoots (and dig out roots) of grasses and sedges much like other geese; they also pluck ripe berries. Common prey items include Baltic clam, blue mussel, and barnacles. They consume a wide variety of tundra and marsh plants, including creeping alkaligrass, marsh arrowgrass, beach rye, blue lyme grass, beach pea, seabeach sandwort, Fisher’s tundragrass, Hoppner’s sedge and other sedges, black crowberries, eelgrass, and marine algae such as sea lettuce.
Emperor Goose
They are vegetarians with voracious appetites for grasses, sedges, rushes, forbs, horsetails, shrubs, and willows. They will consume nearly any part of a plant—including seeds, stems, leaves, tubers, and roots—either by grazing, shearing plants off at ground level, or ripping entire stems from the ground. In winter and during migration they also eat grains and young stems of farm crops, along with a variety of berries. Goslings may eat fruits, flowers, horsetail shoots, and fly larvae.
Snow Goose
They eat plant matter, rarely insects. When they arrive on breeding grounds, just as the tundra begins to thaw, they eat mostly roots of grasses and sedges. As the season progresses, they eat cottongrass, birch, and sedge shoots. Wintering birds eat cottongrass, chickweed, sedges, yellow sweet clover, common bulrush, spikerush, saltgrass, millet, barley, rice, corn, and other domestic grains. They forage while standing or walking slowly, grazing by picking short shoots, seeds, and grains. The larger-billed Snow Goose frequently digs outs roots and tubers, which they normally only do after heavy rains soften the ground.
Ross’s Goose
They are herbivorous, feeding on a variety of plants throughout the year. During the breeding season, they eat the fresh green parts of plants, while during the winter, they target underground storage parts. Favorite summertime plants include marsh plant roots and agricultural grasses; birds also consume leaves, roots, and seed heads from a range of plants. During the winter, these geese feed on grasslands and, depending on availability, barley, oats, wheat, potatoes, carrots, turnips, sugar beets, and other agricultural crops. the birds of this variety that overwinter in marshes focus on eating sedge roots, supplementing this with the leaves of grasses and sedges.
Graylag Goose
They eat primarily sedges, grasses, berries, and plant tubers during the summer and seeds, grain, and grasses in the winter. They peck at vegetation and stems, plucking tubers, seeds, or grains from plants. In the water they peck at emergent vegetation and submerge their head to reach underwater plants.
Greater White-fronted Goose
They eat plants throughout the year. Icelandic breeders target different foods as they move from the coast (grasses) to mid-elevation areas (horsetail shoots and underground stems of alpine bistort) to breeding sites (willow leaves and catkins). As summer progresses, they switch to grasses and sedges and then to high-energy berries as they prepare for migration. In the winter, they forage primarily in grasslands and agricultural fields. These geese feed on crops including barley and wheat stubble, potatoes, carrots, beets, peas, clover, and more. They forage mainly by grazing in fields and other open areas, feeding in water much less than the larger Graylag Goose.
Pink-footed Goose
They eat mainly plants, pecking rapidly at them on the ground. On their wintering and migratory staging grounds, they feed almost entirely on grasses, both planted and wild. These birds that are wintering in the Netherlands ate about 150 grams of grass each day, or up to about 10% of their body mass. On Svalbard, birds just returning to their breeding grounds feed mostly on mosses. As snow melts and plants begin to grow, their diet shifts to include the leaves and stems of saxifrages and horsetails, willow buds, grasses, and sedges.
Barnacle Goose
They eat mostly plant matter, especially grasses and grasslike plants. Their diet varies remarkably across their large breeding and wintering ranges. For most of their lives, they feed in family groups, both on the breeding and wintering grounds, and families migrate together in autumn, joining with other family groups to form large flocks. They feed by walking slowly and grazing, pulling at the plant and cutting off the preferred part with serrations on the bill. They also forage by digging up the rhizomes and roots of some plants.
On the breeding grounds, they eat sedges, grasses, rushes, spike-rushes, seeds, and even berries, including cranberry, crowberry, and blueberry. During migration and on the wintering grounds, they forage on agricultural crops and waste grain, including wheat, rye, oats, corn, rice, alfalfa, sorghum, barley, soy, and clover. Native plants such as burreed, hornwort, knotweed, and rushes may form part of the diet in freshwater wetlands. In saltmarshes, They may eat plants like saltmeadow hay and eelgrass, but usually these are food for the larger Canada Geese. They also consume pasture and meadow grasses, as well as planted grasses in golf courses, parks, and suburban areas.
Cackling Goose
In spring and summer, geese concentrate their feeding on grasses and sedges, including skunk cabbage leaves and eelgrass. During fall and winter, they rely more on berries and seeds, including agricultural grains, and seem especially fond of blueberries. They’re very efficient at removing kernels from dry corn cobs. Two subspecies have adapted to urban environments and graze on domesticated grasses year round.
Canada Goose
They are omnivores, eating everything from seeds to plant tubers and from mussels to insects. During the breeding season they eat both plant and animal foods, but during migration and winter they primarily eat rhizomes and tubers from aquatic plants. They dive straight down to depths of around 7 feet to extract pieces of aquatic plants with their bill. Other food is taken from or just below the surface of the water.
Canvasback
They eat mainly aquatic invertebrates and seeds. They feed in shallow water, near shorelines, on mudflats, and in agricultural fields, taking advantage of whatever foods are most abundant. Migrating and wintering birds may feed at night or during the day. On the water they dabble along the surface where they pluck or strain seeds and invertebrates, and dip their head and neck or tip up to reach submerged food. They also probe mudflats for invertebrates and eat worms, seed shrimp, and copepods living just above the sediment. Depending on where they’re feeding, plant foods may include sedge fruit, seeds of pondweeds, grasses, smartweeds, sea purslane, bulrush, dwarf spikerush, swamp timothy, and agricultural crops including corn and rice. Animal prey includes midges, tadpoles, molluscs, and crustaceans. Chicks up to 2 weeks old eat mainly insect larvae.
Green-winged Teal
They are plant eaters, feeding on the leaves, seeds, fruits, and flowers of grasses, herbs, and shrubs. They do not forage in water, instead focusing on terrestrial plants, both native and introduced. These geese graze on grasses and other plants on the ground, but also extend their necks and even climb into shrubs to reach hanging fruits. When pulling up plants, They eat only the succulent parts, discarding other parts that are less digestible.
Hawaiian Goose
They mainly eat aquatic vegetation, along with some animal prey including frogs, tadpoles, fish, snails, mollusks and insects. In a Michigan study swans ate more animals during their annual molt and in spring when vegetation was scarce. Plant foods include eelgrass, several species of pondweeds, along with filamentous algae, wigeon grass, sea lettuce, bladderwort, flowering grasses, and agricultural grains. They also eat handouts from people, including cracked corn, bread, lettuce, and produce trimmings. They are voracious foragers, eating up to 8 pounds of aquatic plants a day that they tear off with their thick, rough-edged bills anchored by strong bill muscles. They skim plants from the surface and submerge all but their tail and feet to reach vegetation growing in deeper water. They also rake the bottom with their feet to expose tubers and dig up plants to bring to the surface.
Mute Swan
