Brant

Fascinating facts about the Brant

• A brant weighs less than 1.5 kilograms — about the size of a Thanksgiving chicken — yet flies 5,000 kilometres from Arctic breeding grounds to wintering spots along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts every autumn. Some birds make the journey in just 48 hours without stopping, burning fat reserves so efficiently they arrive weighing only 60% of their departure weight.
• Brants are obligate eelgrass eaters, meaning they depend almost entirely on a single seagrass species for survival. When a disease wiped out eelgrass beds along the East Coast in the 1930s, the Atlantic brant population collapsed from 200,000 to just 25,000 birds in a decade — one of the fastest wildlife declines ever recorded. They've since rebounded by learning to eat sea lettuce, proving even specialist feeders can adapt to catastrophe.
• A brant's neck is so short and its body so compact that its head appears grafted directly onto its chest, giving it a silhouette no other goose shares. This stubby profile is no design flaw — it reduces wind resistance during migration and makes the bird more buoyant in the shallow coastal waters where it spends half the year.
• Brants navigate their 5,000-kilometre migration using landmarks they memorise as goslings — the same river bends, coastal inlets, and prairie ponds every single year. If a stopover wetland dries up, entire populations of brants can starve because they refuse to detour to unfamiliar feeding grounds, even when food is abundant just kilometres away.
• In spring, male brants perform an underwater courtship display that looks like drowning — they flip upside down, thrash their wings, and gurgle air through their throats to create a bizarre bubble-and-sound show that somehow impresses females enough to commit to a lifelong partnership. Most brant pairs reunite at the same Arctic breeding site year after year, recognising each other by voice alone.

At a glance

About the Brant

As the Brant glides effortlessly across the wetlands, its sleek, black neck and chestnut-brown feathers glisten in the sunlight, a testament to its remarkable adaptability in a world of shifting tides and seasons. With a soft, murmuring call, it moves in harmony with the landscape, its webbed feet paddling gently through the shallow waters as it forages for the sweet, salty grasses that sustain it. In its annual migrations, the Brant embarks on an epic journey, traversing vast expanses of ocean and coastline with a precision and endurance that has captivated the imagination of all who have witnessed its passage.

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