The nature of the distribution of geese and swans in various habitats

On the territory of the Amur Region, 326 species of birds belonging to 18 orders and 56 families have been registered. One of the orders with the greatest diversity of species is the Anseriformes order (39 species).

Now, one of the most important problems of the Amur region is the reduction in the number of birds. These facts confirm that man, through his activities, exterminates animals, including birds.

The importance of geese and swans in nature is great.

Firstly, these bird species play an important role in the cycle of substances in water bodies. They extract organic substances from water bodies with food, which undergo corresponding changes in the birds’ digestive tract. Bird droppings contain a large amount of soluble salts (nitrates, phosphates); it fertilizes the soil at the bottom of reservoirs and coastal areas. This promotes more intensive plant growth and increases the food supply for fish.

Secondly, waterbirds bring certain benefits to the region’s economy. So, if some species of Anseriformes serve as reliable indicators of the abundance of fish stocks in a reservoir. By eating trash fish, dragonfly larvae, water beetles and many other enemies of young fish, birds bring great benefits to fisheries, and by eating insects they are pests to agriculture.

Thirdly, in densely populated areas of the region, preserved or newly emerged colonies of water birds are unique natural monuments, are of great aesthetic value, and can serve as an object for environmental education of the population.

All of the above is just a small part of the meaning of geese and swans in nature.

Geese and swans living in the Amur region belong to the class of birds, which has unique features that allow them to master both air, water, and terrestrial habitats. The external and internal structure of birds is largely dependent on the ability to fly - these are various morphological adaptations that facilitate body weight, its streamlining, warm-bloodedness, a highly developed nervous system, and care for offspring.

The body of birds is covered with feathers. In waterfowl, feathers are abundantly lubricated with fat, which helps them master the aquatic environment. Webbing between the toes helps you swim easily.

Geese, and especially swans, are very beautiful, elegant and graceful birds. It is not for nothing that poems and songs have been written about them since ancient times.

Let us dwell in a little more detail on the little swan, mute swan and whooper swan.

Small swan

The number of small swan, according to the Red Book of Russia, is about 20,000 individuals. The swan adheres to low-lying and high-lying wetlands with an abundance of water bodies. This type of swan is mainly found in tundras and forest-tundras. Sexual maturity occurs in this bird in the third year of life, but practically formed pairs give offspring no earlier than 3-4 years of age. They place their nests on the ground, on hillocks, on hummocks, on islands of ponds or in wet swamps. The cradle is not tricky, not bulky. It is made from local building materials: dry blades of grass, twigs, moss, stems and leaves, etc. The hollow of the nest is made of feathers and down. The female lays 3-4 eggs in this hollow somewhere in early June. They incubate them for 28–30 days, and the male is nearby all the time, on guard duty. The swans hatched from the eggs quickly dry out and are immediately ready to follow their parents anywhere. Little swan chicks grow quickly on pasture. At the age of 40–45 days they are already able to fly. Their early ripening is determined by the conditions of the north: summer is short, you have to hurry so as not to stay in the tundra for the winter - you won’t be able to withstand its harsh conditions.

The small swan is the smallest bird in size compared to all swans. Its weight is about 5 - 6 kilograms. The little swan is migratory (found only on migration in spring and autumn). The bird feeds mainly on plant foods, but also catches small animals - fish, mollusks, worms, insects, crustaceans, etc. Enemies - arctic foxes, skuas and large sea gulls.

Lesser swans live in many zoos around the world, including zoos in Russia. Swans live long. For example, in the Moscow Zoo, cases of swans breeding at the age of 20 years and a life expectancy of more than 30 years have been recorded. Swans do not have vocal abilities. The sounds they make are unmelodic and loud.

Swans – mute and whooper

Two species of white swans - the mute and the whooper - are common inhabitants of our zoos and city ponds, where they are kept as ornamental birds. The mute mute's body length is up to 1.52 meters, its wingspan is up to 2.6 meters, its weight is up to 22.5 kilograms.

In nature, whoopers occupy more northern areas that have not yet been developed much by humans (the Kola Peninsula, Kanin, the lower reaches of the Pechora and Ob, Kamchatka, etc.), while mute mules do not live in the tundra and taiga zones. They are found in the more southern latitudes of our country (the Baltics, the Black Sea region, the Azov region, the Caspian region, the Balkhash region, the Baikal region, reservoirs of the Kazakhstan steppes, etc.) Both species are rare and subject to protection. The mute swan is a vagrant (flies into the Amur region), and the whooper swan nests in the Amur region.

The mute swan floats on the water more gracefully than the whooper swan. The mute mute's neck is curved in the shape of the letter S, and the head is slightly tilted down. At the base of the beak there is a black swelling (bump), and at the end there is a black nail. The entire middle of the beak around the nostrils is red. The whooper's neck is extended in a straight line upward without bending, and the head is held at a right angle to the neck. The beak is black from the tip to the nostrils, and yellow from the nostrils to the base.

The feet of both species are black as adults. And in young animals, the mute mute emits a sharp hiss when it is irritated by something. Occasionally you can hear his hoarse, not very loud, rattling voice. The whooper, on the contrary, does not hiss, but is capable of producing loud screams reminiscent of the sound of a French horn. It is interesting to note the differences in the habits of these two types of swans. The mute spends more time on the water than the whooper. In accordance with this, the mute dries its paws “float”. The whooper manages to dry its paws on the shore. You need to pay attention to how the mute fish alternately puts its paws out of the water to dry. A swimming bird leans slightly with its body on its side and puts its paw above the water like a sail. When the paw dries, the mute makes a roll of the body to the other side and puts out the second paw, and the first one makes swimming movements, scooping up water. In this way, the swan protects the skin of the legs from swelling, which occurs with prolonged exposure to water on the epidermis and can lead to the formation of deep cracks in the skin.

Observations of the life of swans in captivity have shown that for nesting it is necessary to protect the nest on the sides with vertical planes, like a wall of dense coastal thickets of lakes or rivers, in addition, there must be a “mirror” of water in front of the nest. In nature, the mute swan for nesting chooses a lake with reed thickets, among which it arranges a simple nest for itself. In the zoo, the nesting stimulus is the booths on the shore of the pond, with the open side facing the water. Swans willingly make nests in them, since here they receive conditions close to those found in the reed beds of natural reservoirs.

Thus, birds react to external stimuli that do not exactly, but only approximately correspond to natural ones. This indicates that the reflex to the “nesting landscape”, developed over centuries, is characterized by irradiated excitation, as a result of which it varies within certain limits and serves as an adaptation to the changing nesting conditions in nature.

The manifestation of care for the offspring of swans also deserves attention. For example, mute swans protect their brood from the first days of chicks hatching from eggs until they “fly”. The swans stay with their mother day and night, without going onto land. They hide under the female’s wing or climb onto her back when they want to warm up or rest. It is interesting to watch how the mother swan lowers her tail to the water and the swans climb onto the mother’s back along this kind of bridge. Adult swans, in search of food, tip their body upside down so that the body of the bird takes a vertical position (tail up), and the head on an outstretched neck plunges into the water, reaching the bottom with its beak. In shallow places, swans thus reach underwater parts of plants, their roots and tubers, as well as small animals inhabiting the bottom silt. This habit of swans is inherited by swans, who, from the second day of life, instinctively try to tip over into the water, but, of course, they cannot get food from the bottom. Adult swans - parents “help” their chicks catch small animals, stirring up the water with oscillatory movements of the body and paws. In this case, the food rises from the bottom to the upper layers by a current of water and enters the chicks’ mouths. The “swaying” reflex persists for three weeks, and then stops (inhibits), since the grown chicks cease to be the irritant for their parents that previously caused this reflex.

In autumn, on the ponds you can see how adult swans behave towards their already grown-up swans during feeding. While the chicks are eating, the adults do not swim up to the feeders, driving away other swans. Only after the swans are full and stop eating, do the adults - the parents - begin to eat the food. All these “noble deeds,” however, are temporary until the appearance of the chicks changes so much that it no longer evokes the proper reflexes in the parents. 2.5 - 3 months after hatching from eggs, swans are covered with feathers instead of down and change in the size of their body, reaching the weight of adult birds. After the first moult they “take wing”. These changes cause reflexive changes in the behavior of adult swans in relation to their offspring. Mute swans - parents stop reacting like parents to the presence of grown-up swans, not distinguishing them from other birds.

“Caring for the offspring” disappears, and the next year, during the new nesting period, the parents are already driving away their children from last year’s brood along with other people’s swans, not allowing them to approach their nesting site. In whooper swans, the reaction of “caring for the offspring” is more protracted and continues until next spring. However, even in this case, it disappears without a trace with the onset of a new mating season, when new reflexes come into force and parents cease to “recognize” their children, making no distinction between them and other swans.

On the territory of the Amur Region, the species composition of geese prevails over the species composition of swans. Of the different types of geese, the most common species in our area are the greylag goose, the swan goose, the black, white-sided, red-breasted, brent and white-breasted geese, the white-fronted goose, the white-fronted goose, the lesser white-fronted goose, and the bean goose.

The brent goose is the smallest of the geese that fly over us. Average weight is about two kilograms, beak 3.5 cm, wing 35 cm. The general plumage is black, only the gray half of the belly is gray. The beak and legs are black. During spring migrations, it rests during the day on the Zeya Spit. It flies without any formation, sometimes in large schools. The most intense spring migration is on May 19-26 before the evening dawns. Sometimes in broad daylight and even at night, the voice “kling - kling”. Nesting grounds of the brant goose are noted along Aldikan in the Mazanovsky district. Flies south in mid-September.

The gray goose is the bird from which domestic geese descend. This is especially noticeable when comparing the sounds of birds. The cackling of both geese consists of the sounds “gagagag”. In addition to this, the gray goose sounds “ik” or “ek”. And if an enemy approaches the nest, the birds greet him with a powerful hiss. The color of the gray goose and the domestic goose can vary greatly. There are, however, domestic birds that are very similar to wild birds. But there are brown, motley and completely white domestic geese. Gray geese travel in groups outside of nesting time, often in the company of other geese. The body length of the greylag goose is between 76 – 89cm. Female gray goose males are colored the same: gray plumage, light tips of feathers, a white shaft in the middle of the feather, light wings are visible in flight, white undertail, meat - red or orange - yellow beak. Legs are always the color of meat, loud cackling. The gray goose feeds on green shoots, plant seeds, berries, and roots. The gray goose nests in reed thickets or in dense thickets of other plants; the inside of the nest is lined with down, which is used to cover the eggs when the female leaves the nest. There are usually 1 - 9 whitish eggs in the nest, laid from March, one brood per year.

Swan goose

The swan goose is found on migration more often than the gray goose; it nests in the Amur region. Endangered. In the past, it inhabited vast areas of the south of the Asian part of Russia, and currently the total number is approximately no more than 400 pairs.

Gumennik

The bean goose with an orange-black beak is very close to the gray goose. This migratory bird nests in the Amur region. While geese rest or winter mainly in meadows, geese stop on the coast, primarily in shallow water. Geese during their wintering are an unforgettable sight. You can often see hundreds, or even thousands, of geese gathered in one meadow. From the ground where they spent the night, they take off either singly or in groups to search for food. The bean goose eats mainly grass, clover, other plants and seeds.

The body length of the bean bean is 70 -90 cm, weight 3.5 - 4 kg. It has gray-brown plumage. The head, neck and front wings are dark gray-brown, white tail, black ends of the tail, white undertail, black beak with an orange ring, legs orange-yellow. Makes sounds less frequently than other greylag geese, usually the two-syllable "kayak".

Bean bean locates nests on the ground between trees, a clutch of 4-6 white eggs, nesting from May - June, incubation duration 27 - 29 days, one brood per year.

Geese and swans are among the migratory birds. Every animal at some point in its life leaves one place and goes to another. Regardless of whether this journey extends over a few centimeters in search of food or a mate, or covers vast areas of the globe during migrations, the bird must have a certain type of sensory apparatus that ensures it moves in the desired direction. Birds are the most famous travelers. Geese and swans fly both day and night. During migration, birds move faster than during simple flight. Returning from wintering grounds, geese and swans fly faster than when they fly to wintering grounds. The flight of birds from one place to another is called the Latin word “migration.”

For orientation during long migrations, geese and swans, like other migratory birds, use the position of the sun and stars in the sky, the Earth's magnetic field, Cariolis forces arising as a result of the Earth's movement around its axis, as well as other landmarks. Geese (geese) arrive in the Amur region on approximately April 22-23, and the mass arrival is approximately on March 19-26. The dry nose arrives first. The mass arrival of the swan-nose begins approximately from April 11 - 15, and the brent goose - from May 7 - 10.

Birds are forced to migrate because they are accustomed to the environmental conditions in a given area and if these conditions change, then the bird simply cannot exist in this area. The abundance of food here may change, and warm weather may give way to severe frosts.

The species diversity of the Anseriformes order in the Amur Region is large, some species even nest.