Urban Canada Geese Choose Summer in the City

Anchorage, which is Alaska's hub of more than 257,000 people, attracts a fair amount of wildlife. Moose live in patches of woods throughout the city, lynx have been spotted on ski trails, and an occasional black or grizzly bear wanders through town. One creature that's taken to the city life, the lesser Canada goose, has worn out its welcome at airports, parks and businesses. Wildlife managers are now experimenting with ways to reduce by half the Anchorage population of urban Canada geese.

In 1995, an AWACS jet taking off from Elmendorf Air Force Base sucked Canada geese into several engines, causing a crash that killed 24 people. The birds also drop about six tons of feces a day during their summer stay in Anchorage, according to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report. Another problem is that urban geese lose their shyness, and often chase and bite people who stray close to nests.

Why does a wild creature want to live in Alaska's biggest city? Dave Crowley, a wildlife biologist with the Anchorage office of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, said geese love the parks, lakes and lawns of Anchorage. "Clipped, fertilized, watered grass is perfect food for a goose," Crowley said. "We've created a goose paradise in town."

As Anchorage grew, the geese followed. The first pair may have settled in Anchorage after flying up from Potter Marsh in the early 1970s; more were lured by new parks and airports. In the mid-to-late-1970s, a few hundred geese spent their summers in Anchorage. Today, the population is about 4,500, Crowley said.

The managers' goal is to trim that population to about 2,000. To reach that number, people from groups as diverse as the Department of Transportation and the local chapter of the Audobon Society banded together to form the Anchorage Waterfowl Working Group. The simplest suggestion the group offered, to kill more than half the adult geese by decapitation, inspired demonstrations from animal rights activists. The group also has looked at many other, non-lethal, alternatives, one of them studied by Lea Hix.

Hix is a graduate student at the University of Alaska Anchorage whose master's degree project is to document the reproductive success of the urban Canada goose. She's studying what happens when people remove eggs from Canada goose nests. One of the goose-control methods being tested is to have volunteers hike through nesting sites and remove all but one egg from each nest they see. Hix has found that by leaving one egg, the mother goose will usually not nest again, and the number of goslings is reduced to one from an original clutch of about five eggs.

Though the method of taking every egg but one may be successful, Hix said Anchorage has a unique problem--many people collect the eggs to eat. When they grab the eggs, they usually don't leave any in the nest.

"If somebody comes and takes all the eggs, the birds re-nest," Hix said. "Not only does that make more goslings, it's very energy consumptive."

Biologists are also moving goslings from Anchorage to other areas. When geese migrate north, they return to the areas where they learned to fly. When I called Crowley, he had just returned from transporting 80 goslings from Anchorage International Airport across Cook Inlet to Susitna Flats. In theory, those goslings will join wild geese there, then migrate in fall to Baskett Slough in Oregon's Willamette Valley, where geese from Anchorage hang out in winter. Next spring, they should return to Susitna Flats rather than Anchorage International.

Removing eggs from nests and giving goslings airplane rides will only slow the growth of the Anchorage goose population. The inevitable next step is to kill some of the adult geese, Crowley said, a plan supported by many people in Anchorage but again opposed by animal-rights activists.

The killing of adult geese is seen by biologists as the most realistic method of reaching the goal of 2,000 geese by the year 2001. "The only way to get to our population goal is to actually kill adults," Crowley said. "We know this is going to be necessary."