WSJ on Canadian Geese who "Don't Know Where Canada Is"
June 25, 2003
New Goose Recipe: U.S. Plans To Ease Culling of 'Residents'
Geese That 'Don't Know Where Canada Is' Could Face Early Demise in U.S. Suburbs
By JAMES P. STERBA
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
KENT, N.Y. -- Ever since Annmarie Baisley, the town supervisor here, spent $8,000 to turn 125 Canada geese on Lake Carmel into edible protein four years ago, she's been getting cards calling her an assassin. She's also been getting re-elected.
The 1999 Lake Carmel roundup began before dawn on June 24, when the geese were in their annual feather molt and couldn't fly. The big birds were herded with boats into shore pens, then loaded into crates bound for a slaughterhouse -- their frozen breasts destined for a church food pantry. It was over before breakfast.
The next morning, protesters -- all but one from out of town -- showed up with placards, one reading, "Baisley the Butcher." But most residents were pleased to have the lake's picnic grounds, walking paths and five public beaches free of goose feces for the first time in years, town officials say. Water quality improved. Swimmers felt safer.
For decades, roundups such as Kent's were tangled in red tape and snarled by animal-rights protesters. Getting federal and state permits took months, and deciding whether to be for or against geese was a local politician's nightmare. That's changing as nonmigrating geese populations burgeon -- the U.S. total is estimated at 3.5 million to five million -- and costs of dealing with them balloon. With towns and states lobbying for relief, Washington has eased the federal permitting process and is now planning to do away with it completely.
In a rule change pushed by state wildlife agents and expected by fall, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans to delegate authority to the states to issue permits to kill so-called resident Canada geese and their eggs. The plan's goal is to reduce nonmigrating geese populations by upwards of a million birds over several years. The Humane Society of the U.S., a Washington-based animal-protection group, calls it a plan for "mass killing."
The idea, officials say, is to make it easier for towns, companies and others who want to get rid of geese, by allowing destruction of eggs or killing of adults. Several options would be open. Liberalized hunting seasons could reduce populations in some rural venues. But hunters are in decline. And since hunting is off-limits and frowned upon in most suburban areas, wildlife-control companies are looking forward to big business when permits for roundups become routine.
Canada geese are one of 836 species of birds protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1916. The Humane Society of the U.S. says allowing them to be killed "violates both the language and the spirit" of that treaty. But the Fish and Wildlife Service asserts that most of these geese don't belong under the act because they don't really migrate. They stay put, more or less, year-round.
Why have these geese stopped migrating? Wildlife authorities are asked this question more than any other about geese. Did climate change make them stop? Pollution? What could possibly cause a majestic V-formation of honkers high overhead on a thousand-mile migration to the Arctic tundra to suddenly drop down and land on a golf course in, say, Greenwich, Conn., defy their instincts, and take up the posh suburban life?
The answer is startling to many Americans: These geese didn't stop migrating. They never migrated. These geese, say wildlife historians, have virtually nothing to do with wild, migrating flocks. "Resident" geese -- the ones most likely to be seen in suburban parks, ponds and soccer fields -- are descendants of farmed geese and flocks of "live decoys" once used by professional hunters.
The Fish & Wildlife Service calls them "hybrids ... originating in captivity and artificially introduced" around the country. In other words, in most places these geese are a non-native species thriving, like feral cats and kudzu, in an artificial habitat: the welfare-wildlife world of sprawl.
Not everyone makes the distinction between "resident" geese and wild ones. "The term 'resident' is a convenient fiction," wrote Ann Frisch, national coordinator of group called Coalition to Protect Canada Geese, to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in a 1998 opposition to the plan. "The choreography of the terms resident and migratory has the intent to remove the Canada geese from the protection of law." Ms. Frisch, and others, argue that the cause of the problem in the first place was the vigorous propagation and stocking of geese by state fish and game agencies to enhance hunting opportunities -- and boost revenues by selling more hunting licenses.
Loved for their beauty and loathed for their excrement, Canada geese have divided the suburbs for decades. The birds generally weigh 10 to 16 pounds, and live about a dozen years. Each goose defecates five or six times an hour, depositing 1.25 pounds of feces, on average, daily. "Lawn carp" some call them. Even the late George Harrison took a shot at them in a song called "Pisces Fish" on his last CD: "Rowers gliding on the river, Canada geese crap along the bank ..."
Corporations, colleges, golf courses, airports, municipalities, water reservoirs, cemeteries and others spend millions of dollars a year using dogs, noise, chemicals and other means to keep geese off places people don't want them to be. New York City, for instance, has budgeted $4.5 million over the next three years to keep geese and other birds from degrading drinking water in its reservoirs.
Orangetown, N.Y., opted for a "humane" no-kill policy for its geese that involves harassing them with border collies. It pays Mary Felegy, president of Fair Game Goose Management Services Inc., $12,000 annually to have her collies chase geese off one 40-acre park. The municipal golf course pays her another $12,000 to harass geese off fairways.
Nearby Clarkstown paid $6,500 to kill 452 of its thousand or so geese in 1996 and 1997. But the town council, pressured by an animal-rights group, stopped the roundups. Clarkstown now pays Mrs. Felegy $36,000 a year to hound geese off parks and ponds with her dogs.
Clarkstown supervisor Charlie Holbrook thinks chasing geese is a waste of money that only makes the birds someone else's problem. Adds Gregory Chasko, a Connecticut wildlife official: "The collie people have a great thing going. They chase the geese off the park in the morning and they fly to the golf course. Then they chase them off the golf course in the afternoon and they fly back to the park."
That can happen, admits Mrs. Felegy. But she says the geese her dogs chase away usually fly to "nonconflict" areas where people aren't bothered by them: median strips of expressways or around megamalls.
Twelve geese remain on a secluded end of the 201-acre Lake Carmel in Kent. This April, Tom Maglaras, a licensed wildlife controller, found three of their nests, punctured 15 eggs with a barbecue skewer, and billed the town $400. Destroying eggs, a practice sanctioned by animal-protection groups, reduces populations, but at a slow rate. To have the same impact as killing one adult goose, say wildlife biologists, you have to destroy all the eggs it lays over an average lifespan. Destroying 95% of the eggs over 10 years would reduce the goose population 25%, given average rates of adult resident geese mortality, they say.
After four Canada geese were sucked into the engines of an Air Force jet in Alaska in 1995, causing it to crash and killing all 24 people aboard, airports have had to up their vigilance. Delaware's Dover Air Force Base pays Rebecca Ryan, director of Flyaway Farm and Kennels, in Southport, N.C., about $100,000 annually to keep geese away from runways using border collies. Migrating geese stop in seasonally, but day-to-day problems are with the local geese, she says. "They have no idea where Canada is."
The comeback from near-extinction of the giant Canada goose (Branta canadensis maxima), is one of the great wildlife success stories of the 20th century. That it went terribly awry late in the century is an irony pioneering conservationists couldn't have thought of -- anymore than they could have thought of suburbs.
In contrast, few people today can conceive of the desperation early conservationists felt in the face of the rapacious slaughter of wildlife after the Civil War and into the 20th century. It was called the "age of extermination."
Robins were routinely killed and eaten back then. People collected and ate songbird eggs, too. A huge market for wild-bird feathers, sold to hat makers, thrived world-wide. At the London Millinery Feather Market's quarterly sale in August of 1912, the feathered skins of 1,600 hummingbirds, bound for bonnets, sold for two cents each.
Just as the great herds of American bison were killed for commercial gain, all wildlife was the booty of professional hunters who killed year-round without limits on what they could sell. Butcher shops were full of birds and animals shot or netted by hunters. Wild birds were killed out. The Labrador duck became extinct in the 1870s and the passenger pigeon, netted and sold as squab, soon would be too. (The last one died in the Cincinnati zoo in 1914).
"Of all the meat-shooters, the market-gunners who prey on wild fowl and ground game birds for the big-city markets are the most deadly to wildlife," wrote William T. Hornaday, director of the New York Zoological Park, in 1913. "Enough geese, ducks, quail, ruffed grouse, prairie chickens, heath hens and wild pigeons have been butchered by gunners and netters for 'the market' to have stocked the whole world."
Stopping this carnage was the first triumph of the American conservation movement. It took decades. In 1878, Iowa adopted the first bag-limit law, restricting shooters to 25 prairie chickens per day. In 1900, the first Federal conservation law, the Lacey Act, prohibited interstate commerce in illegally-killed game. In 1901, Oregon limited hunters to 100 ducks per week. Enforcement, however, was rare.
In 1916, the U.S. and Great Britain (on behalf of Canada) signed the Migratory Bird Treaty, to regulate commerce in wild birds. Legislation implementing it passed two years later. But by the 1920s, some six million recreational hunters had become as much of a threat to wild fowl as professional hunters were before. In 1930, the giant Canada goose, which had been relatively easy to hunt, was widely believed extinct in the wild. Bringing it back became an urgent quest.
Something crucial happened in 1935: Live decoys were outlawed. These were wounded or caught birds, used by hunters to lure wild birds into gunning range. Decoys were held captive by cutting a wingtip or clipping feathers so they couldn't fly. Decoy flocks held some of the last giant Canada geese in existence.
When live decoys were outlawed, hunters got rid of tens of thousands of the birds. Wildlife agencies took some, to help restock wild populations. But many settled in local communities. Some towns wanted the geese for park ornaments, like peacocks. Farmers took and raised others. The geese embraced human habitats and handouts. When America's suburbs sprouted after World War II, "resident" geese soon moved in. With plenty of food and protection from predators and hunters, they thrived.
Jim Forbes, a retired Wildlife Services agent for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, recalls hearing about President Eisenhower encountering goose feces on a country-club fairway in New York's Westchester County in the 1950s. "I heard Ike slipped on some goose doo-doo and asked: Can't something be done about this?" he said.
From then until the 1980s, Mr. Forbes said, federal agents rounded up "nuisance geese" in the suburbs, and relocated them to other states, where they were wanted for hunting. In 1982, an avian influenza outbreak brought relocations to a halt. Goose populations soared. By the time relocations were allowed again, nobody wanted geese anymore.
Nonmigrating geese are multiplying fastest on the East Coast, says the Fish and Wildlife Service, at an average rate of 14% a year since 1989. Nonmigrating geese now outnumber wild, migrating geese along the Atlantic Flyway, the agency says.
Some see political capital among residents fed up with geese. In a statement issued before Federal goose hearings in May 2002, Congressman Jim Saxton said: "Every citizen in New Jersey who drives past a farmer's field or pond, or walks through a park or soccer field can see the problem. It's much worse than five years ago, but it's not nearly as bad as it will be five years from now if we don't act soon." Run-off from goose droppings into the water supply, he said, is "a serious public health threat."
Back in Kent, N.Y., Kathy Doherty mails out "how to" packets to towns seeking advice on dealing with their geese and the "inflammatory misinformation" and "plenty of anger" generated by animal-rights groups. Mrs. Doherty, who was chairwoman of the Lake Carmel Park District, researched the problem and lobbied the town council to approve rounding up the Lake Carmel geese. She was rewarded by being elected to the council herself.
"Heck," says Clarkstown's Mr. Holbrook, "you could run for president on this issue."
Write to James P. Sterba at jim.sterba@wsj.com
Updated June 25, 2003
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