I have tried to find what information is available about the spread of breeding Canada Geese in the Willamette Valley. Like many other urban and suburban areas of the nation, these geese are recent arrivals, unlike the m ultitudes that have wintered here for millennia.
Click here to read my piece on the geese in Salem Reporter.
I told a friend I was writing the piexce after I learned that Foster City, CA, is aiming to kill off or transpkant its goose population! I forgot thre friend had worked for years in Foster City. The reply:
| to me |
“Foster City geese???? Those are still there? I worked in Foster City at [a law firm] (then it was on Mariners Island Boulevard) for many years, and the geese were so thick that employees couldn’t get from the sidewalk to the office without calling Security because they were so aggressive, and pecked hard enough to draw blood. They also had to have someone out there with a power hose to wash off their poop enough that the sidewalk wasn’t a slip and fall hazard, and then the area next to the sidewalk became a giant slime pit.
“So they asked me in the Legal Department if it was OK to trap and kill them. As I recall, this was just before Thanksgiving, but it could have been before some other 3 day weekend. I stalled, saying I needed to do research on the Migratory Bird Act and that would take a while. When they insisted on an answer, I told them that it would be a federal offense to kill them. When I came back after the long weekend, they were all gone. The security guards smiled and said that all their friends had roast goose for holiday dinners. I never knew what actually happened to them, but while I worked there they never came back. Maybe they did migrate.
“When we weren’t dodging the geese, we would look out our windows into the trees at Black Crested [Crowned] Night Herons feasting on the baby ducks as they hatched in the scenic pond. They ripped them apart while they were still alive. It was pretty horrifying, and we wasted SO much time watching them. Nature is very cruel.”
This is the usual look of a local lawn in winter:
Towheeblog 
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