Upland goose
species of bird
The upland goose or Magellan goose (Chloephaga picta) is a sheldgoose of the shelduck-sheldgoose subfamily of the Anatidae, the biological family that includes the ducks and most duck-like waterfowl such as the geese and swans. Sheldgeese resemble true geese and display similar habits, yet they are more closely related to shelducks and ducks.
This species nests and breeds close to water (rivers, ponds, oceans) either on the ground or near it among vegetation, usually in grasslands or coastal meadows in the Falkland Islands or in southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego at the beginning of the austral summer. Population estimates suggest the insular subpopulations are stable, but continental populations show a recent decline in abundance. Upland geese are herbivorous, specializing in plant leaves, stems and seeds.
Taxonomy
The upland goose was formally described in 1789 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae. He placed it with the other ducks, geese and swans in the genus Anas and coined the binomial name Anas picta. Gmelin based his description on the "painted goose" that had been included by the English ornithologist John Latham in his A General Synopsis of Birds. The species had been observed in 1775 on Isla de los Estados during Captain James Cook's second voyage to the Pacific Ocean. The naturalist Joseph Banks had provided Latham with a water-colour drawing of the goose by Georg Forster, who had accompanied Cook.
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The subject matters to the science & nature register because the source frames it as species of bird. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q129036. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1789 and 1775.
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This entry incorporates text from “Upland goose” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.