Canada Goose

Here's a Canada Goose I met. This is an extremely common bird found in water or in grassy areas, but there's plenty about them that many of us don't know.

Originally this was a primarily migratory species, and some of them are still migratory today, spending their summers in the northern US and in Canada (hence the name). But in the early 20th century habitat loss and overhunting threatened the Canada Goose with extinction in the Atlantic coast states. Since then a few things have happened:

  1. We imported subspecies of Canada Geese from other parts of the US (I've heard the came from "plains states" and Michigan). Though very closely related to our original Canada Geese, this subspecies doesn't believe in migration, and took up permanent residence where we used to only have seasonal visitor geese.
  2. Some habitat protection and tighter hunting laws allowed the migratory Canada Geese to make a comeback, so we now have Canada Geese that are permanent residents and seasonal visitors.
  3. At least some areas now have an overpopulation of Canada Geese, where they crowd out some other waterfowl and produce more bird poop than is really good for a local environment. (I should stress that Canada Geese aren't generally hostile towards other waterfowl like Mute Swans can be; they seem to have an amicable relationship with the local ducks as far as I can tell.)

April 3, 2021 at Duke Farms


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