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One sure sign that winter won’t last forever is the
spectacle of geese high overhead, flying north. They’re common, I know, but it
still brightens my day when I walk out and hear them, and have the opportunity
to watch their loose v’s form and re-form. These high-flying geese migrate as
their forebears have done for millennia.
Would that we could enjoy all geese from a distance.
Other geese are active now, too, our “resident” Canada geese.
You can usually tell resident from migratory geese because they fly much lower
as they commute from resting areas to feeding spots around town. It’s resident
geese I’m thinking about today.
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Photo by: The News-Gazette
Kyleigh Steenbergen, 5, of Fisher kneels on top of a picnic table
on May 23, 2010, as she watches geese at Crystal Lake Park in Urbana.
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If you could ask a flock of resident Canada geese for their
thoughts on an ideal landscape, here’s what they would probably tell you. “Start
with a water feature, preferably a pond, and to make it really perfect, put an
island in the middle. Surround that pond with level ground that slopes gently
to the water’s edge, and plant that area in a monoculture of turf grass. We
like to eat that, and it also allows us to move about freely and see any
would-be predators before they can sneak up on us.”
If you were to explain to these geese that such a landscape
supports very little other native wildlife, they would not care. They’re geese.
If you were to point out that the prodigious quantities of poop they produce
make that landscape unpleasant or even unusable for people, they would not
care. They’re geese. If you were to ask these geese not to multiply so
effectively, they’d say, “It’s the business of geese to make more geese. We
geese do not think in terms of ecosystems, and we couldn’t care less about
human needs.”
You may recognize the landscape described by our geese
around town—at subdivision detention ponds, golf courses and corporate parks,
as well as sites under the management of local park districts. These sites were
not created for the purpose of supporting a Canada goose population explosion,
but they have made it possible.
That population explosion has put people who manage such
places in a pickle. Take Crystal Lake Park in Urbana, for example. The goose
poop there now renders much of the park unpleasant for a walk and unusable for
children to play or families to picnic. Even my friends who are hardcore
birders complain.
Urbana Park District personnel—who do think in terms of
ecosystems, and who care very much about the needs of people for outdoor
recreation—have run through the gamut of creative devices intended to deter
geese without making any significant headway.
Over the long term, they plan to make landscape changes that
will increase biodiversity and promote a more natural aesthetic, which will at
the same time reduce the amount of ideal goose habitat. But in the near term,
they also plan to make the park more usable for people again by more active
management of the goose population. That means interfering with goose nests and
eggs to limit reproduction. And they want the public to understand what they’re
doing and why from the start.
Toward that end, the Urbana Park District will conduct a public
meeting regarding Canada geese on Wednesday March 4, from 5:30-6:30pm at the Anita
Purves Nature Center in Urbana. The meeting will cover the life history of the
Canada goose, goose impacts on Crystal Lake Park, a history of management
efforts, and recommendations from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.
