Posted by Tanya Zabinski on September 21, 2007

Q: !. Whenever I see Canada Geese flying in their "V" formation, it is daytime or dusk. Do they also fly at night? How often do they land? And when they land, what do they eat? And when they stop to eat, for how long do they refuel before hitting the road again? Do geese fly over or around large bodies of water? And how fast do they fly?

Thank you!

State: New York

A: You've asked some interesting questions. There are many variables involved here so any answers I give are generalized and not the "last word" on this.

Geese often fly in V formation when traveling. Studies have shown that this kind of group flight arrangement does indeed reduce energy requirements for birds behind the leader. But just because you see geese in formation doesn't necessarily mean they're migrating - they may only be traveling to a local feeding area. Usually, low-flying geese are just locals while high-flying geese are probably traveling greater distances.

Geese do fly at night. I live in the Finger Lakes area of New York state and in the early spring, we often see and/or hear them in the very early morning hours, just before dawn, arriving from the south. These geese pass overhead and settle in to the lake here after flying much, if not most, of the night. Geese are basically herbivores and prefer to feed on a variety of succulent plants. They will eat corn and other grains if they can find them during migration. How long they stop and how long they feed in a given area would depend on different factors such as kind of food, quantity of food, how long they had flown getting there, weather conditions, and wind direction and velocity. In other words, what one flock of geese might do at a given place and time could be very different from another.

Although many of the songbirds do avoid flying out over large bodies of water like the Great Lakes, geese are known to travel across large expanses of water. However, geese do tend to follow large geographic contours of mountains, coastlines, and other major features in their migrations both spring and fall - they often travel along the coastlines of the Great Lakes. I did some searching online to find out about their migration speed and want to note that this too has many variables. Migrating birds prefer to travel with winds at their "back" - traveling with the wind, not against it. This means if they're traveling with a 12mph wind, their speed over the ground is increased by that amount over their own flying speed. As a very general flight speed in relatively still air, Canada Geese are known to travel around 43-45mph.

Hope this answers your questions satisfactorily. Thanks for asking.

John Wiessinger ( September 22, 2007)

A: Whoops, I put the flight speed in kilometers instead of miles per hour. Should read 43-45 mph. Sorry.

John Wiessinger ( September 22, 2007)