Since 2016, teams of students and scientists have been documenting travel and reproduction patterns of Canada geese in Nanaimo to help curb environmental and agricultural impacts caused by the birds.
A group of researchers captured dozens of geese at Departure Bay Beach on Monday, July 3, for the VIU Canada Goose Project’s seventh year of tagging and tracking Nanaimo’s goose population.
READ MORE: Canada goose from Vancouver Island makes it all the way to the Great Lakes
Stewart Pearce, a lead researcher weith the project, said geese were introduced in the area in the 1970s and ’80s to increase hunting opportunities on the Island, and as the population grew there was an increase in human-goose conflicts on agricultural land and recreational areas.
“People don’t like to play soccer on goose poop,” he said. “And when they feed, they actually rip the grasses right out of the mud, it’s causing a ton of erosion and degradation of marshes and crop degradation on agricultural land, so you can see the geese are pretty hard on farmers.”
Pearce said the team tries to tag about 200 geese every year by giving them unique collars with clear numbering and colours so they are easy to identify, and people who see the geese can report the sighting to the research team. The team tracks what the population is doing, how many are residents and stay in the city, how many are migrants, how far they migrate and whether they come back.
“If all these geese were residents and stuck around and you wanted to remove them, you’d knock the population right down. But we know now from this study, that’s not really the case as only about a third of them actually stick around the city, so that’s a little trickier for management,” said Pearce.
The project evolved from a VIU study into a contracted project under the City of Nanaimo in which the VIU team tracks the birds and the city handles eggs and controls reproduction to help limit the goose population. Pearce said of the birds tagged in Departure Bay, none had hatched in 2023, which is a sign the city did “really well.”
So far this year, the team tagged 120 geese with the goal of tagging around 200; however, Pearce said there’s been fewer birds since the project started in 2016.
The team urges residents to report sightings of the collared geese at http://wordpress.viu.ca/gooseproject.
READ MORE: VIU student maps goose movement in Nanaimo
bailey.seymour@nanaimobulletin.com
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