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Greater White-fronted Geese are large geese with a long neck. They have a dark-grey head, with a white frontal mask around the base of the upper bill. The front is mid-grey, with prominent irregularly shaped broad dark-grey bars on the belly. The undertail coverts are light-grey. The back is mid-grey, like the front. Only the wings have a brownish-grey bar pattern on the coverts. The flight feathers are dark-grey. The irises are dark-brown. The bill is pink, with a light-grey tip, while legs and feet are bright-orange. First winter Greater White-fronted Geese have only a small white frontal mask and little or no barring on the belly. Juveniles are all-grey, without a facial mask and a black tip of the bill.

The overall distribution of this species can be assessed, and specific locations where birds have been spotted can be found, based on individual sighting reports submitted by birdwatchers to ebird.org .

The global distribution of the Greater White-fronted Goose is available HERE .

There are several races of Greater White-fronted Geese, of which nominate race "albifrons" has the widest distribution (for details see a field guide).
The range of the Greater White-fronted Goose extends basically around the northern hemisphere. Their breeding grounds are in the Arctic, spanning all northern continents and coastal areas of islands, such as Iceland and Greenland. Their wintering grounds are in temperate to subtropical climate zones, from Mexico and the US in North America to parts of central Europe, Asia Minor and on throughout mid-latitude Asia and parts of the Arabian coastlin to Mongolia, southern China, Korea and Japan and far-eastern Russia in the East.

In continental Europe only Greater White-fronted Greese of nominate race "albifrons" are found as winter visitors. They occur in suitable wetlands in northern central Europe (the Benelux countries, southern Denmark, northern Germany and northern/central Poland), in parts of the Danube catchment (most prominently in the Hungarian Pusta) and along the North coast of the Black Sea. Apart from these areas, they are found only in selected wetlands in central Germany, western/central France and northern Spain. Otherwise, they can be observed as large skeins on the sky during their migration from the wintering grounds to their breeding grounds in northern Siberia.

On the British Isles races "flavirostris" (from Greenland) and "albifrons" can be found as winter visitors.

In Europe Greater White-fronted Geese can be found in both coastal and riverine wetlands, usually in grassland/meadows near shallow water.

D. Wilczynska reports spotting Greater White-fronted Geese, race "albifrons", in wetlands of the river Bug, near Brok, Masovia, Poland, in March 2017.

J. Pires reports spotting Greater White-fronted Geese, race "albifrons", in the Tejo estuary, Portugal, in October 2018.

A. Sarok found Greater White-fronted Geese, race "albifrons", in Vojvodina, Serbia, in the timeframe 2010-2024.