The big bird round-up at Pea Island

It’s hard to believe now, but at one time, conservation officials hoped to boost the resident population of Canada geese and somehow get them to stay in North Carolina year round. Now they’re trying to reverse that success.
Some Canada geese are migratory waterfowl – making annual pilgrimages from their summer homes to their winter feeding grounds. One of the remarkable attractions to Eastern North Carolina from around late fall to late winter is the huge visitation of tundra swans and snow geese that winter in the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge.
These big birds are an astonishing sight for city dwellers who normally don’t see a bird any larger than the one that adorns the Thanksgiving table. Their presence is one reason folks are fighting the Navy’s plan to put a practice jet landing field near the Pocosin refuge.
In an era whengovernment agencies, academicians and conservationists work pretty hard and spend a lot of money to maintain wildlife habitat and promote a healthy population of animal and plant life, it’s hard to imagine too much success.
But that’s the case with the Branta canadensis – Canada geese. They’re wild geese with black heads bearing a white patch. Some are migratory but a great many are not – they’re here and intend to stay. Not only are there too many, they apparently make a mess and gobble up food that migratory waterfowl need to feed on when they arrive here.
For years, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has struggled to figure out what to do about them nationally. Most particularly they are “a serious problem” at the Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge on the N.C. Outer Banks.
A report issued by the service in June noted that a sharp increase in geese means that as many as 250 birds may be feeding in one place on a given day. “On occasion as many as 400 resident geese have been counted feeding in the impoundments during a time when the refuge is trying to produce food (submerged aquatic vegetation) for migratory birds,” the service says.
The Fish & Wildlife Service recently announced it plans to reduce the resident goosepopulation. It will allow a range of options, including Canada geese hunting seasons. It hopes to reduce the resident bird population by more than a million birds over the next decade to a population of 2.1 million nationally.
As a sign of how serious the service is about reducing the flock, it plans to allow the use of electronic calls and unplugged shotguns to for sport shooting of the birds.
But not at Pea Island. That’s an “inviolate refuge” for migratory waterfowl so the only time that hunters could distinguish between migratory waterfowl and resident waterfowl is during the summer and into September before the migrant waterfowl fly in. “Hunters don’t seem to be interested – they say it’s just too hot,” the service said in a news release in June.
That left the Fish & Wildlife Service with one effective alternative: gassing the birds to death. “Trapping and euthanizing the resident geese has been chosen as the most reasonable and prudent way to deal with the problem,” the service said Aug. 11. It will herd the geese into pens, load them into a trailer and take them to a remote site to be “euthanized in a carbon dioxide chamber – which is a humane process.” Their bodies will be buried or frozen as food for the red wolf, which federal officials are also trying to restore to a sizable population.
Unless the Fish & Wildlife Service succeeds in reducing the number of resident birds, it won’t be long before they consume all the food migratory waterfowl need, the agency says. So the euthanization process puts the service in the position of killing birds it once encouraged to live here in a refuge considered “inviolate sanctuary” – at least for migratory waterfowl.
One more example, no doubt, of the law of unintended consequences at work.