By TODD McLEISH/ecoRI News
contributor
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| Volunteer Alexis McCabe learned Canada geese are stronger than they look. (Todd McLeish/ecoRI News photos) |
But that was how McCabe, a first-time volunteer, had just been taught to hold the goose as she attached an aluminum band around the bird’s leg.
“It was a very bizarre experience,”
admitted McCabe, a Warwick resident and a student at the Community College of
Rhode Island.
“I was very concerned about the location of its beak. And banding it was more difficult than I thought it was going to be, because the goose was a lot stronger than I expected.”
“I was very concerned about the location of its beak. And banding it was more difficult than I thought it was going to be, because the goose was a lot stronger than I expected.”
The goose and a dozen others had
been herded by five kayakers — staff and volunteers with the Rhode Island
Department of Environmental Management (DEM) — into a pen adjacent to Green End
Pond on July 2 as part of an annual effort to monitor Rhode Island’s resident
Canada goose population.
Capturing the geese took longer than
banding them, but even that wasn’t especially difficult, since the birds were
in the middle of molting their flight feathers, a three-week process that
begins in mid-June and makes them unable to fly.
Josh Beuth, the DEM biologist who
oversees the banding of 600 to 800 resident geese each summer, said the state’s
population of non-migratory geese was established in the late 1980s, when the
migratory population was declining.
“The resident population has taken
off better than anyone expected they would, and now we have a fairly liberal
hunting season to keep them in check,” he said.
Beuth estimated that there are
between 3,000 and 7,000 Canada geese that live in Rhode Island year-round,
mostly near urban areas along Narragansett Bay, including Apponaug and Pawtuxet
coves in Warwick, the Seekonk River in Providence and East Providence, and in
Newport and Middletown, where “big houses have big lawns that go down to large
bodies of water.”
Where the geese gather in areas of
high density, the birds’ feces can raise bacterial levels and increase nitrogen
in the water, which can lead to algae blooms and unhealthy water.
“The geese aren’t the primary source
of pollution that leads to the closure of beaches, but they definitely
contribute to the problem,” Beuth said.
The birds can also be a nuisance to
homeowners, due to the large quantity of droppings they leave on lawns.
“The most common thing I hear when I
show up at a site to band the birds is, ‘Are you here to take the geese away?’”
Beuth said. “But we can’t relocate wildlife. As soon as they can fly again,
they’ll go right back where they came from. And nobody else wants the problem
anyway.”
He advises residents with nuisance
geese to allow a natural vegetative buffer to grow between the water’s edge and
the lawn, to provide a place for possible predators to hide and to make it
difficult for the geese to get from the water to the lawn.
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| Biologists and volunteers banding 600 to 800 resident geese each summer. |
To keep the population of resident
geese from expanding too much, the state has extended goose hunting season and
raised the bag limit for those hunting resident geese.
Since it’s impossible to tell the difference between a migrant and resident goose, the fall hunting season begins in September, long before the migrant geese arrive in the region, when up to 15 geese may be harvested per hunter per day.
Since it’s impossible to tell the difference between a migrant and resident goose, the fall hunting season begins in September, long before the migrant geese arrive in the region, when up to 15 geese may be harvested per hunter per day.
In Providence, Bristol, and Kent
counties, and the northern part of Washington County, where most of the
resident geese live during the winter months, the hunting season extends into
February, with a bag limit of five birds per day.
“The areas where the resident geese
are hunted have far fewer nuisance issues than in the urban areas where hunting
isn’t allowed and where people feed them, which only adds to the problem,”
Beuth said.
The population of migrant Canada
geese has recovered from the declines it experienced in the 1980s and ’90s,
though in recent years it has undergone another slight decline, leading state
wildlife officials to shorten the hunting season this year from 70 days to 60
and reduce the daily bag limit from three to two.
“Migrant birds breed on the tundra,
where they have a limited breeding season,” Beuth said. “If it’s a late ice-out
year or there’s limited food available, it could lead to the birds being in
poor condition or having poor reproduction. They have boom and bust years, and
if you get several bust years in a row, the population can really take a hit.”
After the team of goose banders
completed its work at Green End Pond, they moved on to Gardiner Pond, where
they banded 25 Canada geese and captured six others that had been banded in
previous years.
By the end of the goose molting period, the team of biologists and volunteers banded a total of 704 resident Canada geese in Rhode Island and recaptured an additional 259 previously banded birds.
By the end of the goose molting period, the team of biologists and volunteers banded a total of 704 resident Canada geese in Rhode Island and recaptured an additional 259 previously banded birds.
Rhode Island resident and author
Todd McLeish runs a wildlife blog.