Goose Herding a Growing Industry

  • Giant Canada Geese, Belle Isle, Detroit. (Photo by Celeste Headlee)

In just thirty years, the Giant Canada Goose has gone from near extinction to a now-thriving population. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of geese gather on golf courses and in state parks, often causing problems for their human neighbors. As the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Celeste Headlee reports, some property owners have found a unique solution to the problem:

Transcript

In just thirty years, the Giant Canada Goose has gone from near
extinction to a now thriving population. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of geese
gather on golf courses and in state parks, often causing problems for
their human neighbors. As the Great Lake Radio Consortium’s Celeste
Headlee reports, some property owners have found a unique solution to the
problem:


A year ago, dozens of families flocked to Pier Park in the Detroit suburb
of
Grosse Pointe Woods for an annual Easter egg hunt. Children rushed
onto the
grass with their brightly colored baskets and then stopped abruptly when
they found themselves surrounded by Giant Canada geese and their
droppings.


Park manager Michelle Balke says local residents decided
the geese had to go.


“They left droppings everywhere. You couldn’t walk on the grass. They’re
aggressive. If kids start going up to them, they start hissing back and it
got really annoying. They were everywhere.”


It hasn’t always been like that. The Giant Canada goose was so rare 30
years ago that many scientists thought it was extinct. But a few of the
large birds were spotted in the 1960s. The Michigan Department of Natural Resources began
an aggressive recovery program and there are now three and a half million Canada geese in the
U.S.


Conservation agencies say the birds cause hundreds of thousands of
dollars in damage every year because of accumulated droppings, overgrazing,
attacks against people and threats to aircraft.


(sound of geese)


Tom Schneider is the curator of birds at the Detroit Zoo. He trades
glares with a large male bird that has taken up residence on a lawn at the zoo. The
big black and grey goose honks at Schneider, warning him to stay away
from his chosen territory. Schneider says one aggressive bird can be a bit of
a problem, but a large crowd of them is unacceptable.


“People tend to like them until they get to be a certain number where they
become a nuisance, and when they become a nuisance, they don’t want
any geese. So, you might have a lake that has five pairs on there and that’s
great, but if you have 50 pairs of geese on there, it’s not so good
anymore.”


Schneider is a member of the Canada Goose Coalition. The group
includes representatives from the government, hunters, scientists and animal
welfare organizations. The coalition deals with the large population of Canada
Geese in the Great Lakes region. Schneider says one of the problems
with the birds is that they eat grass. Most birds don’t.


“The problem is they don’t have very efficient digestive systems. So they
have to eat a lot of food to get their nutrients, so as a result they
produce a lot of fecal material.”


Schneider says property owners have struggled to deal with large
groups of geese and the droppings they leave behind. One adult goose produces
about a pound and a half of droppings every day. When there are a hundred
birds on a piece of property… well… you can imagine. But the birds are federally
protected. So there’s not a lot that you can do.


(sound of geese)


But…one guy got an idea and called Barbara Ray. Ray had for years
been training border collies to drive sheep when she got a call from a man
looking for a dog to herd birds.


“I had a golf course superintendent who just had an idea about trying to
use these dogs to herd the geese… not chase them because the dog
needed to be under control. We certainly can’t have a dog that catches the geese
and shreds them like other breeds would be prone to do. But one that is
simply jazzed by staring down and moving birds in a specific direction.”


Ray says it was easy for the dogs to learn how to drive geese and one
dog can cover several hundred acres. She says border collies naturally
intimidate prey without barking or attacking, so they’re perfect for this
kind of work.


“What they’re using is a ‘let’s make my day’ kind of approach where the
stock believes if they don’t move as the dog quietly approaches, staring at
them in this intimidating fashion, that they’re probably going to follow up and
do something more demonstrative.”


Ray has built a business around training goose dogs and has so far
sold more than 500 of the dogs. One of those border collies ended up at Pier Park
in suburban Detroit. Manager Michelle Balke says it’s been a year since
the dog, Kate, arrived and there is no longer a problem with geese at the
park.


“She had just gotten rid of them, whether they sense her being here or
what, but they just stopped coming around. They were going next door, they
were hanging out on Lakeshore Road out there, but they just weren’t coming
into the park.”


(ambient sound of geese fade in)


Tom Schneider says goose dogs are an effective, humane way to deal
with Canada geese on private property, but it’s not a permanent solution to
the problem of overpopulation.


“The problem with that program… in many ways, it shifts those problem
geese to a different location, so maybe they may no longer be a problem on
this golf course but now they’re a problem on that golf course. While that
does provide some remedy for the people in those situations, it doesn’t really
solve the bigger, overall picture.”


Schneider has led a goose management program for over a decade at
the Detroit Zoo that involves destroying eggs. That program has cut the
number of geese on zoo grounds from between 500 and a thousand to 50.


This year, Schneider’s team will travel to other places to destroy eggs
and encourage thousands of geese to move on. But you have to have a
permit to do that which is not that easy to do. Schneider thinks goose dogs might
be the best alternative for private landowners.


(ambient sound out)


Goose dogs have become so popular that more than a dozen
companies around the U.S. now train and sell border collies to chase the Giant Canada
Goose.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Celeste Headlee.


(goose sound out)

Too Much Success for Canada Geese?

  • Canada Geese take flight. Photo by Wyman Meinzer, courtesy of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

Canada Geese are about as common as the green lawns they like to hang out on. But at one time they’d almost disappeared from the region. Thanks to successful wildlife management efforts, the goose is back, and now the question is how best to manage a success story that some say has been too successful. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Dan Gunderson has more:

Transcript

Canada Geese are about as common as the green lawns they like to hang out on. But at one time they’d almost disappeared from the region. Thanks to successful wildlife management efforts, the goose is back, and now the question is how best to manage a success story that some say has been too successful. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Dan Gunderson has more.


In 30 years, the giant Canada goose was on the verge of extinction, but the species has made a comeback that amazes biologists. There were just about enough for a gaggle when humans stepped in to help in the late 1960’s, now numbering in the millions today, the goose is a wildlife management success story that won’t stop.


“We’ve spent millions and millions of dollars to bring the population back.
Now it’s high and it’s eating everything in sight.”


Standing on the edge of a waist high soybean field on his Minnesota farm, Chad Jetvig points to a slough about a quarter mile away. It’s obvious where geese feasted on tender young soybean plants early this summer, leaving large bare spots in the field.


Jetvig says he’s always accepted some crop loss from geese as a part of farming among the prairie potholes of western Minnesota, but he says the amount damage is no longer acceptable.


“I would say in the past two years in particular, but it’s been getting worse each year, we’ve started to see huge areas. Just on this one single farm at two hundred acres that’s over 40 thousand dollars right just out of our pocket. That’s a lot of money.”


And thousands of farmers in the Midwest and Northeast U.S. have similar stories.


This year and last, Chad Jetvig has gotten a permit to shoot geese eating his crops, but he says it’s an exercise in futility.


“We came out here and shot one time and the next time you even drive by they’re gone. They’d even know the color of the pickup. If this one blue pickup we’re using came around, they seen that thing, whoosh, they’re gone.”


Only to return as soon as the coast is clear. Those keen survival instincts are one reason for the goose population explosion. There’s also plentiful food provided by farmers like Chad Jetvig, and lots of wetland nesting sites.


There are an estimated 2 million giant Canada geese in the upper Midwest and Northeast that’s far more than biologists like Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, goose expert, Steve Maxson think is ideal.


“I think a lot of biologists are wondering just how high this population can go. It’s already exceeded their wildest dreams I think and it seems even in the face of intense hunting pressure to be increasing in most areas. I guess the bottom line is we just don’t know how high this population can get.”


Biologists rely on hunting to keep many wildlife populations in check, and the Canada goose harvest has steadily increased along with the population. But Maxson says simply allowing hunters to shoot more birds is not the answer. The birds quickly learn how to avoid hunters. Then there’s the eastern prairie goose that nests in northern Canada and migrates through many states in the region. The eastern prairie goose population is much smaller and less robust than the giant Canada, and biologists fear expanded hunting could destroy the species.


The U-S Fish and Wildlife Service draft environmental impact statement due out this fall will offer several population control alternatives. They range from no action, to targeted hunting in areas where geese are in conflict with humans, to extreme measures such as, destroying nests and eggs. Steve Wilds is the Fish and Wildlife Service regional migratory bird and Chief. He says it’s critical a workable plan come out of this process. If not, he fears future management decisions will be political, not biological.


Wilds says the future of the giant Canada goose is at stake.


“So that they’ll continue to be recognized as a tremendous, beautiful part of our natural landscape and yet not something that’s going to be doing so much damage people start thinking of them as vermin rather than really neat critters.”


The Fish and Wildlife plans to take a public input on its goose management plan early next year. Steve Wild says it will be at least a year before any final decision is made on how the Canada goose populations will be managed in the future. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Dan Gunderson.