That chance of hearing the familiar sound of geese honking their way to warmer weather is pretty rare this time of year.
The fair weather fowl are probably at their final destinations comfortably sunning themselves on a beach somewhere down south.
But you may have noticed that a growing population of geese is sticking around these colder climes.
Reporter Lauren Taylor Maurand has the story.
AX 1 Sound of Canada Geese honking in flight (5 sec.) fade under... T1 It’s 6:30 a.m. and a flock of Canada Geese pass low over the manicured lawns of Hamilton, Massachusetts, north of Boston.
Every spring and fall, they nip the grass around the pond in the town park, and leave their droppings far and wide.
They are a temporary nuisance and then they go away.
But across North America, and especially along the Atlantic coast, numbers of non-migrating, or "resident" Canada Geese have been increasing dramatically.
They make their homes year-round on lawns, in office parks, on golf courses and near highways. There are an estimated four million resident Canada Geese in the US and Canada.
Roughly 40,000 of them call Massachusetts home.
AX 2 And the geese, they don't look around and say, well there's enough of us now, we can stop. Their instinct is to just produce, so that's what they do.
That’s H.W. Heusmann, with the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife.
He’s been studying the Canada Goose population for nearly 40 years.
Over the summer, Heusmann and his crew tagged some birds with small leg bands to track them. AX3 Goose Squawk - "There we go." - "Ninety-four is an adult male." Because of their size, Geese don't have a lot of natural predators.
For those that migrate, the harsh Canadian springs keep the populations down.
But for geese that have taken up permanent residence in warmer climates, weather is not an issue, and so the population is booming. To find out why these geese don’t migrate, we went to Nicholas Throckmorton at the National Fish and Wildlife Service in Washington, DC. AX4 These aren't migratory geese that got lazy one day and decided why bother flying from Alaska to Arkansas every year, but rather the result of somewhat human manipulation. In the 18 and early 1900’s, says Throckmorton, hunters used to attract migrating geese by tethering live geese to the ground as decoys.
But as the numbers of migrating geese started to dwindle, that practice became illegal.
Hunters then released their decoy geese into the wild.
Since those birds had been raised in captivity, they never learned how to migrate.
They couldn’t teach their offspring to migrate either.
And there’s another factor contributing to the growing population.
Heusmann at Mass Wildlife says we’ve created a goose paradise with our landscaping and parks.
* AX5 We have all these ponds and retentions, and we are always building new goose habitat, and so this population has grown from those decoy birds into the population that we have today.
In many places, those birds have become a nuisance.
People put up fences or wire across lakes to deter them.
The Federal government issues permits to cover goose eggs with oil to prevent them from hatching.
Some regulations permit euthanasia if the birds become a public health threat.
But ironically, goose hunting, which caused this problem in the first place, seems to be a very effective management tool.
Heusmann has seen the effects of this in Massachusetts.
. AX 6 2:41 In the last two years, our population hasn't grown a lot, and that's probably because we now have 107 days of goose hunting throughout the state.
But not in urban areas, where the goose nuisance is often the worst.
At Sagamore Springs Golf Club in Lynnfield, the green can be a dangerous place for geese, which are sometimes hit by a wayward drive.
But Golfer Brian Coffee says having geese in the way is not the worst part of his game. AX7 If you have geese, you're going to have what geese leave behind.
That’s about one to three pounds of droppings per day for an adult goose .
AX8 So I'd just as soon see them gone.
But unless someone removes them or teaches them to leave on their own, resident geese are probably here to stay. AX13 Geese honking in flight (3 sec)
For NHPR News, I’m Lauren Taylor Maurand
