STANWOOD – They’ve tried cannons, firecrackers and guns. They’ve chased the enemy in ATVs, terrorized them with growling dogs and thrown dead calves into their hordes.
Yet even their fiercest attacks don’t keep this airborne enemy at bay for very long. They always boldly return – in formation, in broad daylight, horns ablaze, bombing away.
It seems there’s nothing farmers can do about snow geese.
And they’re pretty fed up.
“Arrgh, I hate snow geese,” said Stanwood dairy farmer Ted Oien. “There’s nothing good about them.”
This winter is the worst yet for farmers, who face record numbers of snow geese ruthlessly eating their crops and pooping the farmers’ profits away.
There are more snow geese than ever before – close to 100,000 birds.
Ten years ago, between 50,000 and 60,000 snow geese wintered in Snohomish and Skagit counties, the only places in Washington the birds are normally found, according to Mike Davison, state Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist.
Warmer temperatures in the geese’s nesting ground, on Wrangel Island in the Russian Arctic, is boosting snow goose populations.
That’s because fairer weather lets more goslings survive to join their parents on the yearly migration to Western Washington, Davison said.
Historically, snow geese feed on vegetation in Port Susan and Skagit bays. But the birds have tired of eating the same old swamp grass and have developed a taste for pasture grass grown by dairy farmers.
Oien figures thousands of snow geese ate $10,000 worth of grass he was planning on feeding his cows last year. It cost him another $10,000 to replace his loss with store-bought hay, he said.
“They ate down 110 acres and took my whole first crop,” he said. “That’s 110 acres of nothing!”
They’re spreading
Times have been tough for dairy farmers recently – and the increase in snow geese is adding to their financial problems, said Ned Zaugg, a dairy agent for the Washington State University extension program.
This year snow geese have been spotted for the first time ever in the Arlington area, far east of their normal pecking grounds, Zaugg said.
He knows of at least one Stanwood dairy farmer who left farming, in part, because of profits lost to snow geese.
“From a business standpoint, there is no room for this kind of loss,” he said. “This is a huge hit.”
Farmers say the only benefit snow geese leave behind is their nutrient-rich waste – paid for by the farmers who grow the grass they ate.
The tube-shaped goose goo is far more prevalent than flowers in the fields where snow geese graze.
“You cannot walk in a field they’ve been in without stepping it in,” said Oien, 59. “Literally, it’s like every six square inches. So that’s smaller than my foot. It’s good for fertilizer, but gee whiz, I want my grass – not fertilizer. I got enough fertilizer out here in the lagoon.”
The doo, too, has another downside.
It creates a hazard for anyone walking outside and has been known to stain roofs, carpets and clothes.
“You gotta watch out or you might get bombed,” warned Mark Christianson, a Stanwood farmer.
Christianson is also a hunter, so he relishes the opportunity to shoot the geese that eat his crops.
“They’re not real fat, so you got to slow cook ‘em like with a pot roast,” he said over the honking din of geese. “Put a little wine, a few vegetables in with them.”
However, the flocks of geese that blanket his fields are so large, his hunting doesn’t even make a dent in the population.
Snow goose season currently lasts from mid-October to the first week in January. However, if the snow goose population continues to increase, the season may soon be extended, Davison said.
Hunters can’t keep up
This winter, the Department of Fish and Wildlife started a pilot program that paid farmers around $60 an acre to allow hunters to use their fields to shoot snow geese.
Around 330 hunters were issued special permits to use the land and were allowed to invite friends to join them. Davison said the program may represent the future of snow geese management.
In addition to destroying farmers’ crops, the exploding population of snow geese is also wreaking havoc in Russia, by tearing up massive quantities of native grasses.
Consequently, Mike Blackbird, president of the Pilchuck Audubon Society, said he doesn’t mind if snow goose hunting season is extended.
“If snow geese are destroying their habitat because their population is out of control, you have to control them,” he said.
Not all bird fans are as sympathetic to the farmers’ plight.
A few years ago a bird watcher confronted Oien, threatening to report him to authorities, he said. He’d been running through the flocks to chase them away.
“If I was a tourist – what I call a bird hugger – then I probably would enjoy them about as much as anyone else,” Oien said. “But they don’t land on their fields and poop in their yards and eat their grass.”
They land in his.
And so he vows to continue his campaign of gunfire and screams – anything to scare the enemy away.
He fights on, but he’s resigned to his fate. No matter what he does, they’ll always have a wing up – and they’ll always come back.
Reporter Kaitlin Manry: 425-339-3292 or kmanry@heraldnet.com.
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