Problems with snow geese our own fault

[KFDM COOP]

February 06, 2007

Problems with snow geese our own fault

It's bothersome that the conservation order by which waterfowl hunters can shoot as many snow geese as they like, unplug their shotguns and use electronic callers is considered the best management tool we've got to bring that population back to its habitat's carrying capacity.

Politicians' and wildlife managers' hands are tied in this case and others by animal lovers who bury their heads in their hands and profess that nature's problems are best solved by nature.

That may have been the case a few millennia ago, but human interference and intervention in recent history are the cause of many unpleasant situations with wildlife and fisheries. For that reason, in simplest terms, we have a responsibility to fix things we broke.

Snow geese weren't overpopulated when they had to migrate nearly all the way down the flyway non-stop. Nature culled weaker birds right from the sky. Survivors lived to reproduce; dead and injured geese fattened carnivores to help them pass the winter.

As reservoirs were built along the flyway to supply growing cities with potable water, they served also as so many rest stops for migratory birds, including lesser snow geese. The population spiked quickly, trebling in barely three decades, and competition for food on nesting grounds left tens of thousands of acres fully denuded and incapable of recovery for a century or longer.

We caused the overpopulation. We cannot fix it one shotshell at a time, no matter how many waterfowl hunters are willing to keep at it and find friends who don't realize how tough it is to make a snow goose taste better than a stick.

When the problem first was acknowledged, managers offered legitimate means of dealing with it swiftly. Trouble is, none of those ideas (aerial poisoning, high-powered explosives, egg oiling or gathering) was going to leave animal-rights nuts feeling warm or fuzzy. And all the while, as biologists struggled to concoct a plan that might reduce mid-continent snows by a million birds, the geese continued to do the two things they do best: breed, and learn to dodge hunters.

What we're left with now is a population of snow geese that is old, savvy and perfectly willing to muscle into some other species' nesting grounds so long as we continue to feed it for the rest of the year. We don't see the overpopulation as a problem so much down this way, on wintering grounds, because the birds have so many options at this end of their range.

And since we can't physically see the destruction snow geese have caused where they breed, we're not in the hurry we probably should be to put a few (hundred thousand) more on the ground for good.

We can stay the course and continue to peck away, hoping for a few bad hatches eventually to turn the count in our favor, or we can do as the bunny huggers would like and let nature sort it out - which it will do by one or both of its only population-control tools, disease and starvation.

I've seen what avian cholera does to waterfowl and helped removed hundreds of dead geese so that roost ponds could be drained and refilled with fresh, disease-free water. I stood alongside other hunters and birders and people who cared about waterfowl then, each of us willing to wade through foul- and fowl-smelling muck to make sure no more geese or ducks succumbed to this nasty disease.

Curiously absent that winter, from the cleanup effort and from the fund-raising efforts that bought fuel for water pumps and paid for disposal and equipment, were animal-rights advocates. Turns out, often as not, that they are more interested in working against hunting than in favor of animals.

Too bad. Then, as now, a few more hands and minds might help to create a better solution.

[bronco1]

If a Snowgoose makes it past it's first hunting season it has an 80% likelyhood of living at least 7-8 years. We used to be able pick off the younger less wary birds but now they are out numbered by the old ones. Goose huntin is hard hunting at best.

[gringo]

"how tough it is to make a snow goose taste better than a stick. "

;D

[bronco1]

"how tough it is to make a snow goose taste better than a stick. "

;D

You can put a jalapeno and bacon on just about anything and make it edible.

All joking aside there is a guy in Dayton who makes jerky out of duck and goose.

I heard it was excellent, the guy that told me said he would never let another duck go bad in his freezer.