What’s with all the geese?

In more than 20 years living along the 280 corridor, Johnny Hayes has seen hundreds of Canada geese parked on roadsides, paddling in local lakes and waddling along secondary roads such as Inverness Parkway.

But Hayes doesn’t like seeing geese traversing busy streets, especially with a brood of goslings following behind.

“I have seen cars stop, flash headlights or honk horns to slow down or stop other cars,” he said about drivers trying to avoid hitting a parade of honking birds. 

After passing them, Hayes said he can’t help glancing in his rearview mirror to see if the geese made it across the road.

Ask Hayes or many other area residents why the number of Canada geese seems to keep increasing, and they might make an assumption that the geese migrate from Canada, decide they like it here, and stay.

But Jerry Feist of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services said that’s a common misconception.

One of the 11 recognized subspecies of Canada geese migrates here from Canada every winter and returns home in the spring. Another subspecies resides here year-round.

The resident type, known as the giant Canada goose, weighs from 15 to 20 pounds. They were bred and released here beginning in the 1960s in an effort to bring them back from the brink of extinction. It’s this resident subspecies, also known as CAGO, that has proliferated and become a nuisance in some circumstances. 

The numbers have grown beyond what was originally forecast, Feist said, although there is no reliable data on the current number of CAGO in Alabama. It is clear to him that the numbers continue to grow.

“Geese will nest, raise their families and live where they learn to fly,” Feist said. “This is the key point. No CAGO ever came south and decided to stay. Their predecessors were released here as goslings, and they then took their maiden flights here and, thus, this became home.”

CAGO can easily live 15 to 20 years if they aren’t killed by predators, and a single pair might hatch as many as eight goslings a year. The species primarily eats grass and drinks water, both of which are abundant in Alabama.

Like many species of wildlife that have become comfortable living in urban areas, the geese can leave feces dotting lawns, streets, parking lots and golf courses. This waste is connected to a chronic lung condition known as histoplasmosis, Feist said, as well as a host of other harmful bacteria. Even the feces they deposit in ponds, which you might not see, promote bacterial growth in those ponds.

“Their nuisance level is growing exponentially as folks get weary of their feces, eating landscaping, causing auto accidents (and) their aggression…during nesting and brood-rearing seasons,” Feist said.

It’s up to the state and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to manage populations, Feist said. His department is charged with helping manage the conflicts wild animals cause humans, such as deer eating crops or geese causing planes to crash.

To control geese populations elsewhere, the service enacts loosening hunting/legal harvest regulations, but that doesn’t help with geese in urban areas. But if folks along 280 want to lower the number of Canada geese they encounter, it’s largely going to be up to them.

“There are more tools available for private individuals and entities to inhibit reproduction and reduce their adult numbers,” Feist said. “It’s up to folks on a local level to decide when they have too many geese or how many they wish to tolerate.”