.jpg "Mike Krei, director of NRA’s Competitive Shooting Division, killed a coveted double-banded Aleutian Canada goose while hunting California’s North Coast in March. (Photo courtesy of Mike Krei)")
For anyone who grew up in the Pacific Northwest or Alaska before the 1980s, it was virtually unheard of to see an Aleutian Canada goose.
Mike Krei, director of NRA’s Competitive Shooting Division, never saw an Aleutian goose while growing up in Arcata, Calif., for example, despite hailing from a family of diehard waterfowl hunters.
“I was born and raised in that area,” Krei said. “I hunted and fished there for the first 19 years of my life, and I never saw a Canada goose, let alone an Aleutian. Never saw one, never shot one. My family members were ardent duck hunters in the area for generations. My dad was a duck boat builder and so was my grandfather, so waterfowling was something that we did. I grew up hunting birds from 8 years old on up, and geese were never something that we saw.”
Between 1915 and 1936, at the height of the fur industry, Aleutian geese were nearly wiped out by the introduction of non-native arctic and red foxes for fur farming within Alaska’s Aleutian Islands—the geese’s home nesting ground.
Aleutian geese were listed as endangered in 1967 under a special designation that pre-dated the Endangered Species Act, and they were one of the first species protected when the new act took effect in 1973. With no natural defense to the predators introduced by the fur industry, there were only 800 of the birds left by the mid-1970s, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
In fact, the geese were not seen at all from 1938 to 1962, when U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists discovered a small population of Aleutian geese on Buldir Island in the western Aleutians. That discovery led to a multi-faceted recovery effort that included removing non-native foxes from potential nesting islands and moving wild geese from Buldir Island to other fox-free islands in the Aleutian chain. Another important step was the process of acquiring, protecting and managing habitat along the geese’s migration route along the coast of Oregon and Northern California and their wintering grounds in California’s Central Valley.
Finally, the geese were protected via hunting closures—as mandated by the Endangered Species Act—throughout their range.
The geese flourished under these actions, and by the winter of 1989, they numbered 6,300. In 1991 the geese were reclassified as a threatened species instead of endangered, and in 2001 the population topped 37,000, enabling them to be removed entirely from the list of threatened and endangered species.
That 2001 delisting was the culmination one of the greatest conservation success stories in history, showing just how effective science-based wildlife management can be.
The numbers are there to prove it. In stark contrast to the dearth of Aleutians as recently as the 1980s, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in its 2008-2009 status report for Aleutian Canada geese, estimated the population at 79,500 birds, although the feds tacked on a comfortable cushion of plus or minus 26,100 birds. The year before that federal biologists pegged the population at 115,000. Many people believe the true number stands somewhere between 100,000 and 125,000 birds.
Among them is Phil Grunert, a member of the Aleutian Goose Management Team, an advisory group put together by the California Department of Fish and Game and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
“There is no question that everyone that hunted this year, and all of the ranchers and dairy farmers, everybody said there were far more geese this year than there were the year before and the year before that,” Grunert said. “I believe the population is doing well. I really think coming up in the 2010-2011 season we’re going to see even more Aleutians coming through.”
Grunert said there are actually two populations of Aleutian geese. One is known as the Semidi Islands population, and they migrate to the Columbian Basin area in Washington and Oregon each winter. The main population migrates down the Pacific Coast from the Aleutian Islands and winters in the Sacramento Valley, with Northern California’s Humbolt Bay region serving as a spring stopover point as they head back to Alaska.
Aleutian geese are easily identified by the broad white neck ring found below the black feathers of their lower neck.
The population grew so fast in the years after delisting—as much as 20 percent per year—that hunters were called upon to help control the burgeoning flock, as farmers began to feel the effects of thousands of geese wintering and feeding in their fields.
“Through our studies, we found that 12 to 15 Aleutians will eat about as much grass as one beef or dairy cow in one day,” Grunert said. “And they’re a little bird. They’re a little bit larger than a cackler and about the same size as a medium-sized speck. They weigh about 3-3 ½ pounds.”
Aleutian geese favor pastures that have been grazed by cattle because the new, shorter, growing shoots have the highest protein and energy content. Thus, the birds wreak havoc on private lands that have been grazed and oftentimes leave ungrazed public lands alone, causing significant losses for farmers and ranchers.
“They’ll come in hundreds to thousands at a time, they’ll hit one of these fields and mow it down to 4 inches—it takes them maybe two, three days to get it down to that height—and they’ll come back every three or four days and just mow it down again. They get in big lines like storm troopers and mow these fields,” Grunert said.
“What happens then is these birds come in when it’s wet, and they’ll reach down and nip that grass and pull it out because the ground is so soft. Then, not only do you have a mowed field, but now you’ve got a field where they’ve nipped the grass, pulled it out of the ground and it dies. They can turn a field from green to yellow in a matter of days. It’s unbelievable the damage they can do.”
To help alleviate this problem, Oregon held its first hunting season for Aleutian Canada geese in 50 years in the fall of 2005. Beginning in 2006, Oregon and California both received approval from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to hold a late hunting season for Aleutians in February and early March. Since that time the daily bag limit for Aleutian geese has increased from two, to four, to the current number of six per day in an effort to keep up with the booming population.
“What was happening was these birds were coming back around Jan. 10 and the season would close around the 20th or 24th of January,” Grunert said. “So, we were only getting about a two-week period when the hunters were out there shooting these birds and keeping them off of private lands. We made a pitch to the Department of Fish and Game to allow an extended season on Aleutians. What we did was we cut two weeks off of the front of our waterfowl season and put them in late February to mid-March (the latest allowed by federal law). Hunters got a better opportunity to hunt these birds when they’re really here in big numbers and doing the majority of the damage.”
Grunert and Krei, friends for more than 30 years, took advantage of that late season on March 1 and 2 of this year while hunting California’s North Coast, and they took their limit of Aleutians both days.
“It’s a very small window that you get to hunt them, so I jumped at the opportunity,” Krei said. “The first day we hunted them traditionally over decoys and did well. Phil knew the ranches in the area, and we had access to excellent bottomlands, so we were in the middle of them.”
Grunert explained that it’s not always easy to hunt Aleutians over decoys, as there are many older birds in the population, and they are decoy-shy. With that in mind, they had to change their tactics for the second day of the hunt.
“The second day we didn’t hunt them over decoys; we basically stalked them,” Krei said. “We’d watch where they’d come in, and they’d come in 500 strong. There were lots of dykes and levies, so we would sneak along those, flush them, and shoot them that way. We’d also try to intercept and pass-shoot them. It was a great amount of fun.”
More and more hunters are taking advantage of the new opportunity to hunt Aleutians, and California has worked with private landowners who have been particularly hard hit by the birds to open their properties to public hunters through a program called SHARE. The program is a joint effort between the California Department of Fish and Game and the California Waterfowl Association.
“We hand-picked 11 of the best private properties where the geese were hitting the hardest,” Grunert said. “Through the California Waterfowl Association the landowners were provided with insurance. It was open to anyone who had a hunting license; they applied for $5 for each hunt and we used that money [to fund the program]. It was a win-win because all of a sudden the public was able to get in on the very best land where the geese were.”
The success of the recovery program has yielded a great new opportunity for hunters, and regulated hunting is playing an important role in the long-term management of the species, something few people dreamed was possible when Aleutian geese were teetering on the brink of extinction just 40 years ago.
“It’s an amazing recovery story,” Grunert said. “This is really the only place in the world where they’re found. It’s gone from a total disaster of almost losing an entire population of birds to bringing it back to the point where we have an extended season and what I call liberal bag limits, yet we still have an abundance of birds and the population is still growing.
“Are we affecting the population at all by hunting? We’re not even touching it.”
