Resident Geese

Every year, in late August or early September, there is a moment when the bounty of Summertime slips for just a moment, and I become acutely aware for the first time of the rumbling preparations of Fall just beneath the surface. This year, it happened when I was counting bats in an especially populous breeding colony near a lake in Litchfield County. While we were waiting for the first bats to emerge, the still and oppressive August humidity was suddenly cut through by a chilly breeze from off the water and, a moment later, the sound of insistent honking and trumpeting began to build in the sky above. At its climax, a flock of Canada geese, flying in post-card perfect V-formation glided down over our heads and disappeared behind the tree line. A short beat, and there was more honking and splashing from the lake. 

These geese were almost certainly not migrating — it to was much too early for that — but returning home to roost after feeding all day at some local soccer field or highway median. Geese prefer to sleep out on the water, where predators have a harder time reaching them, and will gather in large numbers on lakes, ponds, and reservoirs as the sun starts to go down. Yet the honking and the breeze combined felt like the flipping of a calendar — the road to fall had begun, if only in my mind. 

* * * * *

Twice each year — once in early Spring, once in early Fall — millions of Canada geese embark on an epic journey across the North American continent. A flock of geese may travel as far as 3,000 miles from breeding grounds near the Arctic Circle to wintering territories in the northern United States and southern Canada, or as little as a few hundred miles if they start farther south. Either way, the goal is the same — to escape the worst of the winter weather and find suitable forage in warmer climates. Then, as the days grow longer and the ice melts, they fly back up north again to breed on the quick-blooming tundra and marshlands of Canada and Alaska. The cycle repeats each year, as it has for untold millennia.

You are probably familiar with some version of this story and perhaps have even witnessed it in localized bits and pieces — connect-the-dot Vs stamped on the Autumn sky or hundreds of feathered bodies crowding the ice-free waters of a local reservoir. The image of the migrating goose has a deep cultural history, connecting it to wilderness and, of course, to the onset of Fall and the arrival of Spring. Over the last several decades, however, this image has started to become a little more complicated as more and more geese move into urban, suburban, and agricultural landscapes. Even in the summer, when their migratory cousins are raising families way up in Canada, a great many geese living around human settlements seem to stay put, saturating soccer fields with partially digested grass and sparking heated community meetings. These are called resident geese and, while they do move around to find ice-free water in the winter and optimal breeding habitat in the summer, they mostly stay in the same general region all year round. 

This wasn’t always the case — it used to be that, while a few resident goose populations could be found up and down the major flyways, most birds were migratory. The story of how this changed is a fascinating one and, as is so often the case in ecology, requires us to go back in time a bit to fully explore — though perhaps not as far as you might think. 

The story of the resident goose begins at the turn of the nineteenth century, a dark time in the history of wildlife in North America. During the proceeding centuries of European colonization and exploitation of the content, the populations of a great many plant and animal species had been decimated by over-hunting and habitat loss. These included species like the passenger pigeon and the Carolina parakeet, which were driven to extinction during this time, but also a number of species that we now think of as quite common. Today, there are somewhere between 30,000 and 35,000 wild turkeys and over 100,000 white-tailed deer living in the state of Connecticut (LeBonte and Kirkpatrick 2021); in the year 1900, the wild turkey was regionally extinct, and the white-tailed deer was only hanging on by a thread. It may be hard to believe given their current abundance, but Canada geese, as well as many other species of waterfowl, were also in a state of severe decline at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Canvasback Duck (1)

One of the major causes of this decline was market hunting, the practice of killing wild animals for the express purpose of obtaining and selling valuable products such as meat, hides, and feathers for profit. At various points throughout colonial and modern history, trends in food and fashion resulted in skyrocketing prices for products that could only be obtained from particular species, resulting in unsustainable harvest. In the late 1800s, for example a hunter from the Chesapeake Bay region could sell a single canvasback duck — known for its especially delicious meat when fattened on a diet of wild celery — for $100 in today’s currency (Petrie N.A.)! Most waterfowl wouldn’t sell for nearly that much, but with the invention of the refrigerated train car in 1851, hunters could still make a healthy profit off of “lesser” species simply by killing many more of them. These incentives, plus a lack of enforceable regulations, encouraged market hunters to develop ways to kill as many animals as possible without much effort. The most famous innovation to come out of this period was the so-called punt gun, which was basically a shotgun the size of canon that could kill up to fifty birds with a single shot; these weapons were impressive, but cumbersome and so most hunters relied on newly invented pump-action shotguns and various kinds of traps instead.

It was market hunting that drove that the passenger pigeon, the Eskimo curlew, and several other species of North American bird to extinction. So, what was it that saved the Canada goose and the other animals that almost disappeared during this time in history? The short answer is that a bunch of rich white guys wrote to their congressmen. 

Besides, the market hunters, there were two other groups of people stalking waterfowl at the turn of the nineteenth century. The first group is not especially important to our story here, but is worth mentioning — it included the often poor, rural communities that hunted both to supplement the animal products they bought or produced for themselves and to participate in a culturally significant activity. The second group consisted of sport hunters who had both the resources to buy all the animal products they needed from others and the free time to hunt recreationally if they chose to. This was the late-1800s, so as you can imagine, the only people with that much money and free time were quite rich. These wealthy sport hunters began to notice (correctly) that the market hunters were driving massive declines in wildlife populations and decided to use their resources and connections to do something about it. 

Over the course of a few decades, the sport hunters teamed up with various early conservation groups, such as the Audubon Society, to lobby in favor of new government protections for wildlife. In 1900, they succeeded in passing the Lacey Act, which banned the transport of most birds across state lines, though it was rarely enforced. Then, in 1913, the Week-McLean Act was passed, claiming authority over migratory bird management for the federal government. Five years after that, in 1918, Congress passed the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in order to comply with an earlier agreement with the UK (representing Canada) to protect migratory birds. This law officially banned market hunting and, while it would continue to be practiced here and there for some time, enough of the pressure on bird populations was relieved that conservationists could start thinking about recovery.

But that was much easier said than done. By the early twentieth century, habitat loss was as much of a threat to waterfowl populations as market hunting was. Over the previous 300 years, colonists had set about “improving” the landscape by straightening rivers and draining vast areas of wetland for use growing crops. In the 1930s, when the Midwest was hit by a major drought, the few remaining prairie potholes and marshes that provided crucial feeding grounds for migratory waterfowl dried up, resulting in the deaths of thousands of birds. In response, congress passed the Migratory Bird Hunting Stamp Act of 1934, which required all waterfowl hunters over the age of sixteen to purchase an annual federal stamp. The money from this program was distributed among the states, where it was used to restore crucial wetland habitats. Meanwhile, during the Great Depression, President Roosevelt sent members of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) across the country to perform restoration projects on Federal lands, many of which would one day become National Wildlife Refuges.

All this work laid the foundation for the return of the Canada goose and other threatened waterfowl species, but with their populations already so low, a “build-it-and-they-will-come” approach would only get the conservationists so far. They needed to somehow increase the number of birds living in the wild and, in the late thirties, they got an unexpected opportunity to do just that.

Workers from the Civilian Conservation Corps in Rocky Moutain National Park

In addition to the national ban on market hunting passed in 1918, conservationists also succeeded in lobbying for regulations on what one could and could not do while hunting recreationally. These regulations, which were intended both to protect wildlife populations and to codify the ethic of fair chase advocated for by wealthy sport hunters, included bans on the use of bait, restrictions on firearms that could hold more than three rounds at a time, and lower bag limits. The most important of these new restrictions for our story, however, was the ban on live decoys.

A live decoy is exactly what it sounds like — instead of using a wooden model, you take a live duck or goose (or a whole flock of them) and either train it to stay put or attach it to a lead in the middle of a marsh to convince passing ducks of its safety and promise for finding food. In the days of market hunting, live decoys were very common and raising them was an important and lucrative side gig for many farmers. Because of their large size, it was thought that Canada geese were especially easy for passing flocks of waterfowl to spot, and so they were often prized members of a hunter’s flock.

Most sport hunters did not like live decoys very much, seeing them as providing an advantage for the hunter that was, at best. unsporting and, at worse, contributing to the decline of waterfowl populations. When the practice was finally banned in the late 1930s, it was cause for much celebration in the conservation community, but also created a bit of a problem where large flocks of live decoys, including geese, were made essentially worthless overnight. Some hunters sold their flocks for cheap to local farmers, who raised them for meat and eggs, but hundreds of other geese were bought up by private game reserves and state and federal wildlife agencies, who used them as breeding stock for restoration programs. From the 1930s to as recently as the 1990s, these birds and their offspring were released across the United States to supplement still recovering wild populations and jumpstart the floundering goose hunt. 

The initial hope in releasing geese from the live decoy flocks was that, over time, they would join up with the remaining wild birds and start migrating. That, however, is not what happened. As it turns out, migration in Canada geese is a learned behavior — all individuals are born with a migratory instinct, but must be shown their final destination by their parents and the rest of their flock. Since these geese were raised either by captive parents or directly by humans, they never learned where to go themselves and so they were unable to teach their offspring. The geese introduced as part of these programs would eventually grow into today’s populations of resident geese. These populations don’t migrate because they never did — they are descendants of birds raised to be live decoys and then released into the wild.

* * * * *

Despite their migratory ignorance, resident geese have been remarkably successful. Through the tireless efforts of federal and state agencies, game clubs, and wildlife NGOs, their population reached 250,000 by 1970 and, by 2012, it had swelled to around 3.5 million birds. Meanwhile, the migratory populations also recovered, stabilizing in the 1990s at around 1.84 million. Add those numbers together and you get a resident population that makes up close to 70% of the total U.S. population of Canada geese (Dolbeer et al. 2014).

This raises another question: if Canada geese evolved to migrate and have been doing so for thousands of years, why are these resident geese so successful despite staying put? This question is complicated somewhat by the imperfect categories of migratory and resident geese — some migratory birds, as we have mentioned, breed further to the south and migrate a fairly short distance each year, while resident geese can move quite far within their home region in search of food and open water. Still, it is reasonable to ask what has changed that now allows certain populations of geese to get all the resources they need for the year in a much smaller geographic area.

Canada geese grazing in a field in Litchfield County, CT

The answer here is much more intuitive than the story we’ve just told about the origins of the resident goose. As twentieth century conservationists were stocking restored wetlands with large flocks of captive bred geese, the landscape was changing dramatically around them. Farmland across the Atlantic coast was being abandoned and the Midwest took over as the nation’s breadbasket. Meanwhile, all across the country, suburbs were starting to sprawl out over the land, creating acres of lawns, public parks, sport fields, highway medians, and golf courses. The expansion of both of these habitat types — turf lawns and agricultural land — provided a wealth of resources for growing populations of resident geese. 

Canada geese may be waterfowl, but they are also very much grazing animals — they love to eat grass, especially young shoots. Thus, when humans cut down large swaths of forest and replace them with regularly mowed lawns, rich in young shoots and with secure sightlines for spotting predators, they create a paradise for geese. Especially in more urban areas, where grass and supplementary handouts are often available year-round, geese that do not know how to migrate can rest assured that their winter food needs will be met. For those that do have trouble, agricultural fields rich in high calorie waste grains are a relatively short distance away, as the goose flies. What’s more, urban areas tend to have way fewer predators and almost no waterfowl hunters compared to the countryside. 

All these amenities make cities attractive habitats for both resident and migratory geese — in Chicago, an increasing number of migratory birds that once used the city primarily as a rest stop on their journey south are staying for the whole winter, in spite of the cold (Shoenburg 2022). Complaints and conflict inevitably follow, just like in countless other communities across the country with large goose populations. Close to one hundred years after market hunting was banned and thirty years after the widespread stocking of resident birds ended, the story of the human impact on Canada goose ecology seems far from over. 

That story — the story of how populations of resident Canada geese were established across the United States and found a way to thrive on a changed and changing landscape — is a great example of the important, but often underappreciated relationship between human history and contemporary ecology. History is shaped by the land, by mineral deposits, soils rich and barren, the locations of deepwater harbors, the plants and animals that become cultural symbols; but the land is also shaped by our history. Growing up in context, its easy see the world around us as a kind of natural baseline, but when we take a closer look, we find a landscape filled with stories just like this one — stories that weave together fleeting fads with deep evolutionary time, restaurant chains with food chains. 

Fully understanding these stories and addressing the environmental problems that often arise out of them requires us to move past an overly simplistic nature-culture binary and see the world in terms of noded, but intimately connected relationships. Creatures like the Canada goose — resident and migratory, success story and nuisance, sky rat and symbol of wilderness — present a wonderful opportunity in their many contradictions to force ourselves into this mindset. We step in a pile of shit and curse the sky, even as our heart strings are plucked by distant honking, and we remember that the stains on our shoes are at least partially our own fault. We find ourselves, suddenly in the thick of it all, not mere observers but cause and effect. 

Sources:

Dolbeer, R. A., Seubert, J. L., & Begier, M. J. (2014). Population trends of resident and migratory Canada geese in relation to strikes with civil aircraft. Human-Wildlife Interactions, 8(1), 88–99.

Indian Department of Natural Resources (N.A.) Canada geese behavior and biology. Indian DNR. https://www.in.gov/dnr/fish-and-wildlife/hunting-and-trapping/canada-geese-management/behavior-and-biology/#:~:text=In%20fall%20and%20winter%2C%20Canada,birds%20need%20during%20colder%20periods.

LeBonte, A. M. & Kirkpatrick, H. J. (2021). Connecticut 2020 deer program summary. Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lMpDeNM6k02nSp7nwX-HyldnwdUUsUNk/view

Miller, M. L. (2017). Epic duck: the story of the canvasback. The Nature Conservancy. https://blog.nature.org/2017/10/16/epic-duck-story-canvasback-birds/

Petrie, M. (2023). Ducks for sale: the rise and fall of market hunting in America. Ducks Unlimited. https://www.ducks.org/hunting/duck-hunting-stories/ducks-for-sale

Shoenburg, N. (2022). Watch your step! There really are more Canada geese wintering in Chicago. Chicago Tribune. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/environment/ct-canada-geese-increase-illinois-1103-20221111-wr3nu4nxnrbvlnppupvhycso54-story.html

Sterba, J. (2012). Nature wars: the incredible story of how wildlife comebacks turned backyards into battlegrounds. Crown Publishers. 

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology (2023). Canada goose — Life History. All About Birds. https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Canada_Goose/lifehistory

Photo Credits:

(1) "Canvasback (male) - Aythya valisineria, Cambridge, Maryland" - Judy Gallagher (CC BY 2.0 DEED)