Orinoco Goose

Description: The head, neck and breast is a pale grayish-buff, with indistinct darker mottling and striations formed by dark feather bases showing along rear and sides of the neck, where feather tracts are furrowed. The flanks and belly are chestnut, becoming buffer along upper flanks and dark brown in ventral region. Undertail-coverts are white. The upper mantle and scapulars are rufous, becoming blackish in center of mantle. The back, rump, uppertail-coverts and tail are a black, glossed green. Wings are purplish- to greenish-black, becoming glossed metallic green on secondaries and with white patch formed by white bases to outer webs of secondaries. The underwing is blackish. The male has a high whistle with loud guttural honking during the breeding season, while the female makes a loud cackle.


Breeding: Orinoco geese prefer well-spaced territories along banks of tropical lowland rivers, and nest in hollow trees, rarely on the ground, lining the nests with down. An Orinoco goose may lay between 6-10 pale brownish cream eggs. Orinoco geese are endemic to South America, and are widely distributed in the basins of the Orinoco and Amazon from the Llanos of eastern Colombia and Venezuela to eastern Bolivia and central Brazil, and also in western Paraguay and extreme northern Argentina, but now very scarce over much of its range. The species is particularly sensitive to hunting pressure and now remains common only in remote areas (e.g. in parts of eastern Bolivia) or where given adequate protection (e.g. in parts of the Llanos of Venezuela). (Scott and Carbonell, 1986)

Population: Estimated to have between 25,000-100,000 individuals (Rose and Scott, 1994).

Food habits: They feed primarily by grazing in savanna lands adjacent to their rivers; they rarely swim and are not often seen on the wing.