A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1083 entries
brant
A small dark sea goose, Branta bernicla, that breeds on high Arctic tundra and winters on coastal mudflats and shallow bays, feeding largely on eelgrass. It is compact, fast, and low-flying, moving in loose ragged lines rather than the tidy V of larger geese, and it is far more a bird of salt water than any other goose.
Etymology
Probably from Old Norse brandgás, which reads as burnt goose or burned-black goose, for the scorched-looking head and neck. English also has it as brent, which is the standard British form, and brent in northern dialect means burnt. The genus name carries the other half of the story: Branta bernicla — bernicla is the barnacle, and this bird shares the medieval belief that it hatched from goose barnacles on driftwood, since it too arrived in autumn with no nest anyone could find.