Friday, 1 December 2017

Fighting Egyptian geese in St. James's Park, London

A week ago, on 24th November, during a great walk with my camera round the lake in London's St. James's Park, I heard a lot of noise.  On investigating the loud squawks and shrieks, I realised that a couple of Egyptian Geese were having a fight in the lake.  A few coots had a bird's eye view of the proceedings!


There was a group of around six Egyptian geese involved, but the other four were on-lookers.  Here another Egyptian, presumably female, is clearly telling the boys off.  They still continued fighting in front of their audience of coots.

She got all agitated and flapped her wings, to no avail.  Now there was a fourth Egyptian goose in the melee, on the right-hand side of the fighting Egyptians.

The two male Egyptian geese just carried on fighting one another.

A lot of squawking and splashing of water was involved.


It looked as though one was trying to drown the other.  The black-headed gull was not impressed!



A female Egyptian goose once more came near to try and stop the fight, but they took no notice of her and carried on.

In the photograph below, one Egyptian goose has its beak firmly clamped onto the body of its foe, just below the neck.  The third goose was clearly bothered by all this fighting and has its wings outstretched in order to get away from the mayhem more quickly.

Eventually the two fighting Egyptian geese ended up on land, one still firmly attached to the other, disrupting the pigeons.

The loser managed to escape from the other's clutches and waddled off in high dudgeon.  Meanwhile, the victor and his girlfriend celebrated by squawking in unison.

Then they happily hot-footed it back to the water's edge and the coots were, once again, happy to have a bit of peace and quiet.