If autumn had a sound track, one of its main themes would be the honking of Canada geese as they slice the gray sky in their ever-shifting V-shaped formations.
But if the call of the Canada goose has lost some of its romance, you can thank the green goose goop down by the lake that is often still a fresh and squishy summer memory by the time the migrant Canada geese wing by.
There are three populations of Canada geese in our area: the Atlantic, the North Atlantic, and the resident. Only one of them, the resident, is responsible for the goose goop.
Our romance with the Atlantic population of Canada geese remains unsullied. They are not depositing goop on our lakeshores, not during the summer, anyway. This population nests on the eastern shore of Hudson Bay in northern Quebec. When summer ends and the family is raised, everybody heads south for the winter. They fly over Vermont in October, most of them on their way to the Chesapeake Bay of Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia. They stop here to rest and eat, but then away they go.
“The Atlantic population has come a long way in the last five years,” says Bill Crenshaw, the waterfowl biologist with the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department. This population had a low of 28,000 breeding pairs in 1995, he says. The decline is believed to have been caused by several years of late snow on the nesting grounds. This year 165,000 pairs were counted.
The Connecticut River is the rough dividing line between the Atlantic population and the North Atlantic population. If you are west of the Connecticut River in autumn and see Canada geese flying overhead, chances are good that they are Atlantic geese heading south from Hudson Bay, says Ed Robinson, waterfowl biologist for the New Hampshire Fish & Game Department.
But if you’re east of the river in New Hampshire, you’re likely seeing geese from the North Atlantic population, which is more of a coastal species. They nest mostly in Newfoundland and Labrador and winter in New Hampshire’s Great Bay and in Massachusetts and Connecticut. The North Atlantic population of Canada geese has remained stable and never crashed the way the Atlantic population did. This year, the count is 51,300 breeding pairs.
An extensive goose-banding program has helped biologists connect the dots between nesting places, migration routes, and wintering areas, thanks to hunters who report band information from the geese they shoot.
Over-hunting had decimated both of these populations of Canada goose by the turn of the last century. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 stopped the decline, but the population did not recover on its own. So people all over the United States began encouraging the geese to breed in the U.S. That’s when the trouble started.
In the 1950s and 1960s, there was a Canada goose breeding program in Vermont, says Crenshaw. With clipped wings, the introduced birds nested but couldn’t migrate. Without mom and dad to lead the way, their youngsters didn’t migrate, either. This scenario was repeated all over the East and Midwest. Today, the population of resident geese has soared, and there are over 1,000,000 resident Canada geese on the East Coast, including 35,000 in New Hampshire and 5,000 to 10,000 in Vermont. These are the geese that poop on lawns, beaches, and fairways.
Though the resident Canada geese population has stabilized in most of the East Coast states, it is still growing here.
A New Hampshire Fish & Game goose crew tirelessly bands the resident geese during the two-week molting period in June when the resident geese are flightless. Eric Orff, a wildlife biologist with New Hampshire Fish & Game, works on the goose crew. The crew works quickly to set up corralling nets and a pen for banding. Orff’s job is usually to launch his canoe to herd the geese toward the nets and pen.
The crew bands geese in the upper Connecticut River valley, mostly south of Claremont, but also including a northern population in Lancaster. Orff notes that resident goose populations are most dense where the human populations are most dense. The resident goose capital of the state, he says, is a housing complex in Nashua.
Canada geese eat grass. And they love short grass that can’t hide their predators. Golf courses, public parks, and, yes, even housing complexes (if they have a pond) are their dream environments. With these dream environments proliferating across the landscape, so, too, are the resident geese.
Just don’t shake your fist at the Canadian geese flying overhead at this time of year. The geese that are migrating now weren’t the ones pooping on your lawn during the summer.