MOUNTAIN LIFE - Blue Mountains | Winter 2018

WINTER 2018 ML BLUE 43 BIO PHILIAC words :: Leslie Anthony Here’s a familiar scenario : it’s a lovely summer day and you’re walking barefoot through the grass at your favourite waterfront park or beach retreat; suddenly, the cushiony feel of plant matter is interrupted by a moist, gummy substrate oozing up, thick and green, between the toes of one foot. Damn—goose shit. Forget the commonness of this occurrence (what outdoorist in Ontario can claim not to have stepped in “goose grease” at least once?), or the fact that you were actually keeping your eyes open for it but somehow missed this one cocktail sausage, camouflaged as it was by identically coloured blades of grass. It was still an unhappy surprise and disgusting nuisance. Now you have to clean it off. And watch even closer where you step, spread a blanket, or let your kids run around. Maybe you don’t care and dismiss it as the price to pay for having wildlife around. Maybe you feel complaining about a little animal dung is beneath you, or channels the arrogance of a “first-world problem.” Whatever your take, know this: the overabundance of goose feces—and ergo geese themselves—isn’t just an aesthetic affront, it’s also a growing health issue. Caused by the irruption of a single species—the Canada goose—it’s a de facto problem in Canada, the United States, and other countries. The problem goes back to the early 1960s, when the largest subspecies of Canada goose, Branta canadensis maxima , was an endangered species, having been hunted to near extinction while migrating between summer breeding grounds in the Canadian sub-Arctic and winter haunts in the southern U.S. To rebuild populations, well-meaning wildlife agencies began gathering eggs from captured migratory geese and artificially incubating them in their U.S. wintering destinations. These efforts were wildly successful, but the resulting geese populations had no instinctual or environmental imperative to leave the region in which they were hatched, spending their entire lives in the same general area—including temperate zones with winters mild enough to leave open water. Within a couple of decades, many areas in the northern U.S. and southern Canada were experiencing population explosions of “resident” geese, and the program was suspended in the early 1990s. By then, urban and suburban waterfront parks in Toronto, New York, Washington and elsewhere, typically manicured with extensive lawns, had been turned into poop minefields. As always, the problem was compounded by humans feeding the geese, GOOSE BUSTERS With accessible food and a lack of predators, urban areas bordering water are now permanently attractive to geese whose impacts include not only the nuisance of up to .70 kg/day of solid waste each, but habitat loss and degradation, abundant noise, aggressive behaviour, and water quality issues…