Background
Until early 20th century the Lesser White-fronted Goose was a rather common breeding bird in the mountainous area of Scandinavia and all the way to far east Russia.
Until early 20th century the Lesser White-fronted Goose was a rather common breeding bird in the mountainous area of Scandinavia and all the way to far east Russia.
In 1970 there was only a small part of the Swedish population left. As a reaction to the population decrease, Lambart von Essen at the Swedish Association for Hunting and Wildlife Management together with his colleagues initiated a conservation project for the Lesser White-fronted Goose (hereafter LWfG) in 1975. The first years after the Project start, they put a lot of effort into locating wild LWfG still breeding in Sweden. They also tried to investigate what had happen to the population by interviewing local inhabitants in the area.
In 1981 the first release of young LWfG, bred in captivity, was done in the mountains of Arjeplog, Sweden. This, as an attempt to reinforce the wild LWfG population that was still breeding in Sweden.
The major cause of the drastic population decline was detected as high hunting pressure and environmental changes along the migration route and in the wintering areas in Western Asia and Eastern Europe. Having this in mind, the Project decided to use Barnacle geese as foster parents as they spend their winters mainly in western Europe. The young LWfG then learned to migrate to wintering areas in western Europe, primarily The Netherlands where no hunting was allowed, and the habitat offered a good quality of grasslands. LWfG has a strong philopatry, which means that they will return and breed in the area where they grew up and learnt to fly. So, in springtime the released LWfG returned to the mountains in Swedish Arjeplog, where they were released and learnt to fly. This conservation action was very successful, and the population was saved from extinction by the combination of reinforcement releases and an altered migration route.
In 1999, the work with breeding and releasing LWfG with Barnacle geese as foster parents went into a sudden freeze. A genetic study had discovered introgressive hybridisation from Greater White-fronted Goose among the captive breeding population. The result was that the whole breeding program was terminated.
2020, Diez-del-Molino D et al. published a scientific paper that determined that it is highly unlikely that the reinforcement releases that was done during 1981-1999 caused any element of foreign DNA to be spread into the wild population.
To be able to continue the work with reinforcement releases of LWfG to strengthen the population, young Russian LWfG was caught in the wild and imported to Sweden. These Russian birds became the foundation of a new breeding stock. In 2010 the releases of LWfG could continue but now with Russian descendent birds and without foster parents.
The release of young LWfG and the altering of the migration route in combination worked out well and today the Swedish Lesser White-fronted Goose population is the only breeding population within the European Union.
The Swedish Hunting Association has been the head of Project LWfG since the beginning. Today, Nordens Ark Zoo and Norrbottens Ornithological Association is cooperators within the project, and it runs according to the Swedish Conservation plan for the species. The project has been running since 1975 and the focus has been on breeding and releasing LWfG. Today the project works widely with different actions, national and international, as an attempt to save the Swedish population of LWfG.