NEWPORT — Pity the poor Canada goose with its legs as dark and drab and dirty looking as coal. Quite unremarkable, utterly banal.

So what chance does such a common goose have at wowing an audience when a bird with real star power flies into town? That’s exactly what has been happening on Aquidneck Island in recent weeks since a pair of truly exotic geese arrived and began turning heads — and binoculars.

Almost immediately after the initial sighting, bird watchers from across Rhode Island, then New England and finally from coast to coast began migrating to Newport on — what else? — a wild goose chase.

What could be so alluring? Why the pink-footed goose, that’s what. It’s not only the bird’s feet that are so unusually colored, it’s the legs too.

“The legs are stunning.” gushed Rachel Farrell, a leading bird expert in Rhode Island who saw the pink-footed pair at Hammersmith Farm, in Newport. “They are bright pink, almost bubble-gum pink,”

It’s the first time pink-footed geese have been reported in Rhode Island. In fact, sightings are rare across all of North America. The geese breed mainly in Greenland and typically winter in northern Europe. So seeing one in Great Britain is no more exciting for the English than spotting a double-decker bus. But in North America, pink-footed geese have been spotted only about 15 or so times and only in the past 15 years, Farrell said.

“It’s very exciting.”

The discovery of the pink-footed geese in Newport was made by something of an odd duck himself, at least among bird watchers.

ROBERT WEAVER stands at the edge of a field near where he first saw the pink-footed goose. He’s wearing gray corduroy pants and brown hiking boots, the type of attire you might expect a bird watcher to wear. And, of course, he’s got binoculars hung around his neck. But then he does something rather out of character for the breed: He lights up a cigarette. Weaver laughs and says that he often has to stand apart from his bird-watching peers because his foul habit ruffles their feathers.

The 62-year-old Newport native has been enthralled with birds since he was introduced to Norman Bird Sanctuary through Scouting. He was so captivated with nature and its winged stars that he volunteered at the sanctuary in his youth and worked there for a couple of years in his 20s.

“I liked being outside,” Weaver says. “I got into birding and bird banding and taxidermy.”

Weaver has since spent most of his years as a short-order cook, working at Portsmouth Abbey and at Newport National golf club. He used to enjoy being a freelance news photographer, taking pictures of fires, accidents and the Claus von Bulow trial. His passion for cameras has come in handy when spotting birds he wants to photograph as a souvenir or as evidence of having seen something unusual.

That’s what happened in Middletown in 1976 when he noticed a smew, a merganser usually seen only in Europe. Weaver was the first to get a picture of it.

Weaver likes to go birding on Aquidneck Island two or three times a week. On Jan. 6, he set out for one of his regular haunts, the cove at Fort Adams State Park. The day before, he had seen two greater white-fronted geese there, which was rather unusual.

“I went back to get some pictures of them,” he says. “It was a foggy, wet morning and I spotted these two other geese. So I took some pictures.”

Weaver wasn’t sure what he had seen. But he knew how to find out. He immediately e-mailed the pictures to Farrell, the Ocean State’s unofficial expert on avian comings and goings. Birdwatchers around the state let her know what they are seeing and Farrell consolidates the information in a daily report, Rhode Island Birds, that she e-mails to subscribers. She also edits Field Notes of R.I. Birds, a periodical that serves as the historical archive of Rhode Island bird sightings

“When I saw them in that e-mail that evening, I knew immediately what they were,” Farrell said.

Without a doubt, they were pink-footed geese. A pair visited Connecticut last year and Farrell made a trip to see them. The only other states where they have been seen are Delaware and Pennsylvania.

Weaver, it turns out, was the first to not only spot them in Rhode Island but to photograph them as well.

“After 50 years of birding, it was a good reward,” Weaver says.

PINK-FOOTED geese are slightly smaller than Canadas, with a shorter neck and pink rings around their smaller beak. But in the world of birding, if you’re a leg man, or woman, you’ll surely fancy anser brachyrhynchus (the pink-footed’s Latin name). Their worldwide population is about 220,000, a small fraction of the number of Canada geese, Farrell said.

After receiving Weaver’s photographs, Farrell included the sighting in her daily report. The next morning, a sunny day, she went down to Hammersmith Farm, the bucolic childhood home of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

“When I arrived, there were already about 20 people there,” she says.

They had pulled over on the side of Harrison Avenue, where geese were gathered on the expansive lawn. Among the hundreds of blacks legs were four pink ones, supporting two geese with pinkish beaks.

“They were not that close. They were rather far up in the field. Everyone had binoculars and spotting scopes,” Farrell said. “People were very excited about seeing them. They are beautiful geese. Most people had never seen these geese before.”

Soon, birders from all over the eastern seaboard began flocking to Newport to see the avian sensation. Some flew in all the way from Colorado, California, Texas and Florida.

Farrell has a theory about why the pink-footed geese are now migrating to North America. Reports indicate that goose breeding grounds in Greenland have shifted from the southeastern side of the remote island further to the west, closer to Canada. This is the habitat of the white-fronted geese as well.

Since two pink-footed geese were seen with white-fronted geese in Connecticut last year, and this year both species have been seen in Rhode Island, it’s possible there’s a connection between them, Farrell says.

“It’s interesting to think these might be the same pink-footed geese. We don’t know,” Farrell says. “What we are looking at is whether the pink-footed geese, with their westward shift [in Greenland] are now migrating with some of the white-fronted geese.”

Also bolstering that theory, she says, are spottings in recent years in Rhode Island of the barnacle goose, which also nests in Greenland. This goose has a white head, black neck, a whitish underbelly and black legs.

“It could be theorized that all of these geese have arrived together,” says Farrell. “It’s an interesting ornithological puzzle.”

rsalit@projo.com