FEATURE - Biologists' work shrinks Alaska urban goose flocks
Date: 23-Sep-02
Country: USA
Author: Yereth Rosen
"You'd hit them with your airplanes quite a bit," said Craig Elg, owner of Regal Air, an air-taxi service headquartered at Lake Hood.
Elg said the geese became so numerous they completely took up the grass patches around Lake Hood.
No so anymore. Even as the birds are flying overhead this month in their normal V-formations, heading for warmer wintering grounds, Lake Hood is now nearly goose-free.
That is thanks to a nationally praised program to curb Anchorage's expanding population of the migrating birds. The program was spawned by a fatal 1995 crash at a local Air Force base involving the geese.
The city's Canada goose population has fallen to about 1,500 from more than 4,800 six years ago. Anchorage, Alaska's largest city, has a human population of about 260,000.
Biologists hope to maintain Anchorage's goose population at 2,000 birds or less from now on.
Anchorage's program, which included a variety of nonlethal controls, has been one of the nation's most successful and least controversial, said Rick Sinnott, a biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
Other cities struggling with Canada geese, such as Minneapolis, Seattle and Boston, have faced protests and lawsuits over their control efforts, which involved killing adult geese.
"Probably the biggest difference was we agreed right from the start to try everything first, everything reasonable first, before we went and rounded up all the adult geese and killed them," Sinnott said.
FATAL AIR CRASH
Once numbering only a few hundred, Anchorage's goose population exploded in the 1980s and early 1990s, growing by 14 percent a year, biologists said. As subdivisions spread, the geese feasted on grassy lawns, parks and golf courses - sources of easier meals than the natural vegetation that dominated the area when Anchorage was less developed.
The large flocks created nuisances, like stretches of feces strewn in local parks and traffic blockages on major streets.
In September 1995, an Air Force AWACS jet crashed shortly after takeoff from Anchorage's Elmendorf Air Force Base, killing all 24 people aboard. Investigators found the plane's engines had sucked in several Canada geese just before the crash.
That convinced many Anchorage residents that Canada goose overpopulation was a serious problem.
The Anchorage goose program, conducted by federal, state and local officials, was launched soon after the AWACS crash. Goose controls began in 1998 after two years of study.
The program included an annual egg collection, in which goose eggs plucked from Anchorage shorelines were donated to Alaska Native elders who had grown up eating them. For three years, 400 to 500 eggs were collected annually, officials said.
Biologists also captured and relocated juvenile geese. Up to 300 a year were rounded up in the spring from Anchorage parks and flown to a game refuge away from the city. Research indicates that geese migrate to the sites where they learn to fly, so far very few of the relocated geese have returned to Anchorage, biologists said.
Officials also replanted some local parks with native shrubs, replacing the lush, non-native, goose-attracting grass.
The program is paid for by federal, state and local sources so its exact amount is unclear.
SOME LETHAL METHODS
There were lethal methods used as well.
At the airports, officials shot problem geese when noisemakers did not do enough to scare them away.
Hunters on the edge of town, as well as in the goose wintering grounds in Washington state and Oregon, helped curb the population in Anchorage, as did a growing number of four-footed predators, like foxes and coyotes, living in and around Anchorage.
But when it comes to goose controls, Anchorage has some advantages over other cities, Sinnott said.
The geese do not live in the city year-round, but migrate south in winter. There are relatively wild areas not that far outside of town where hunting can be conducted sa
