A recent news piece reported in the NY Times claimed that the DEC or others (assumedly the US Fish & Wildlife Service) planned to capture, euthanize and bury 170,000 resident geese to achieve the statewide population goal of 85,000 birds. Since an overpopulation of resident, non-migrating geese has been an ongoing problem throughout the state, that story took on a life of its own, despite not be entirely correct.
In spring 2009, following the US Airways Flight 1549 incident, DEC cooperated with federal and local officials to develop an action plan to reduce the number of resident Canada geese that posed a hazard to aviation safety in the New York metropolitan area. U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Wildlife Services program accepted lead responsibility for developing and implementing a specific work plan to reduce the number of geese around JFK and LaGuardia airports. That work plan was designed to be more aggressive, and more effective, than the variety of non-lethal measures that had been used at both airports for many years.
It is the USDA work plan, not the flyway management plan, which describes the goose removal program that occurred in New York City in 2009 and 2010. The USDA work plan cited the Atlantic Flyway plan, and the population goal for New York, as part of their determination that the actions called for were consistent with current management goals and policies of DEC and other wildlife agencies. To reiterate, there are absolutely no plans by DEC or others to capture, euthanize and bury 170,000 resident geese to achieve the statewide population goal of 85,000.
As a writer and editor I travelled often to Canada, including the Ungava Peninsula in northern Quebec, which is the primary spring nesting grounds for Eastern Flyway geese. Two successive poor nesting seasons there caused the USFWS and DEC to drastically reduce our goose hunting seasons and limits. However, a string of milder winter seasons in New York and other eastern states resulted in a drastic increase in non-migrating Canada geese that basically became year-round residents, including nesting and gosling propagation, a factor that was notable when surveying the usual Ungava spring nesting grounds, where the numbers were declining. Couple these with reduced flyway counts due to the Ungava nesting success decline, and geese populations increased far faster than expected, helped along by the more strict harvesting regulations.
As many are aware, the overabundant geese have caused problems, grazing and fouling parks and golf courses, contaminating water supply reservoirs with their droppings. In some ways the problems they cause are similar to those of the increase in cormorants that have required similar reduction management. Like a few others, I’d noted the changes in our geese habits and patterns and wrote about them in this column several years ago. But as often happens with government agencies, the lag time between recognizing a problem and then implementing plans to solve it may take a year or more. The final result was the opening of a special early hunting season for geese in September which has helped but was obviously not applicable to large urban center areas and suburbs such as NYC’s major airports.
DEC continues to advocate for a reduction in the number of Canada geese in New York State to 85,000 birds (from what has since grown to 257,000 birds in spring 2010) because it believes that a much smaller resident goose population would best serve the diverse public interests.
