RSS FeedWeekend Birdery: Reviled Geese
Branta canadensis is not widely beloved. These geese can be troublesome honkers and, weighing about 9 pounds, pose serious risks to human aviation when their numbers are unchecked.
Still it was a bit of a surprise to learn that 400 of them were trapped and exterminated from Brooklyn’s Prospect Park a few weeks ago. Now it turns out that was just the tip of the iceberg. NYT reports:
Officials plan to reduce the number of Canada geese in New York State by two-thirds, eventually trimming the population to 85,000 from 250,000, according to a report prepared by several city, state and federal agencies.
The reduction is part of a larger plan that also calls for the near halving of the Canada geese population in 17 Atlantic states, to 650,000 from 1.1 million.
That’s 165,000 condemned geese in New York and 550,000 overall. I resisted the title variant “Weekend Murdery,” tempting though it was, because I didn’t want to suggest that the wildlife-control professionals are bad people, or even that the goose-control program is necessarily bad policy, even if it seems a bit extreme. Also, unlike some bird populations on the Gulf coast (with whose catastrophic situation I contrasted the goose-control program in a previous post), Canada Goose populations are not seriously threatened by these exterminations, even at this scale. “Some 2.6 million Canada Geese are harvested by hunters in North America, but this does not seem to affect its numbers,” according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Still, I’d imagine that the assured survival of the species would be cold comfort for the hundreds of thousands of individual geese slated for extermination, if they knew what we had in store for them.
Hat tip 10,000 Birds.
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2 Responses to “Weekend Birdery: Reviled Geese”
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Back in the mid 80′s I worked for the USGS in Albany GA. A guy who worked with me liked to hunt geese. He had recently moved from Wyoming to GA. Wyoming was the land of Geese o’Plenty. He had many cool stories of the Wyoming outdoors, but he really lamented the lack of GA geese. In GA, and the east coast generally, there were so few geese that hunting them was illegal. What happened? How did we go from too few to too many?
Also in Albany GA, when I was a kid there was a yearly blackbird migration. In the fall the birds would fly through in numbers so large they blocked out the sun. I have not heard of this migration of blackbirds recently. Did the geese eat them?
I think the geese had been in decline for a long time in the south, but they were re-introduced by restoration programs (supported by hunters) which worked really well. My understanding is that after re-introduced, the geese found that they really liked all the new golf courses, big lawns, etc., and populations have exploded.
I’ve seen huge blackbird flocks like you describe…but not in Atlanta. I think you can see them out in “the country.” But geese do not eat them. Their diet is limited to pure human flesh and jet fuel.