Winter waterfowl populations in the valley are on the rise — and so is the toll on farmers

By BENNETT HALL
Corvallis Gazette-Times

BELLFOUNTAIN — It happens every year. Vast flocks of migrating geese sweep down from Canada and Alaska in October to winter in the Willamette Valley, roosting on open water by night and foraging on open fields by day until it’s time to return to their nesting grounds in April.

It’s a birdwatcher’s dream — and a farmer’s nightmare.

A flock of cackling geese, the smallest but most numerous variety in the valley, will work its way across a ryegrass field like a giant webfooted mowing machine. Hundreds of the mallard-sized birds move as one, heads down and jaws working as they scarf up the nutrient-rich blades and leave behind a uniform green stubble as short and smooth as the felt on a pool table.

“They’ll go out in the center of a field and eat it down to nothing,” said Frank Nusbaum, a fifth-generation Benton County farmer. “If they stay on too long, they can destroy it. They can make it to where it’s not viable to take a crop off of it.”

It’s an age-old conflict, but one that has intensified sharply over the last decade or so as the Willamette Valley has grown in importance — both as a grass seed producer and as wintering grounds for migratory waterfowl.

Changing populations

The valley is home to three national wildlife refuges — William L. Finley, south of Corvallis; Ankeny, near Jefferson; and Baskett Slough, west of Salem. Together they provide nearly 11,000 acres of sanctuary for birds traveling up and down the Pacific Flyway.

The refuge complex was created in 1964 specifically to protect the dusky Canada goose, a dark-breasted subspecies whose numbers had dwindled alarmingly due to hunting and habitat loss. The 5,000-acre Ridgefield refuge opened in southwest Washington the next year. In those days, the dusky made up perhaps two-thirds of the goose population in the Willamette Valley and Lower Columbia River region, which totaled less than 25,000 birds.

Dusky numbers climbed steadily for a time but then began to drop in the aftermath of another significant event of 1964: the Good Friday earthquake that rocked southern Alaska. The magnitude 9.2 tremor raised the bird’s marshy breeding grounds in the Copper River Delta a full 6 feet, encouraging the growth of brushy vegetation. As the brush moved in, so did predators such as coyotes, grizzlies and bald eagles, which began to take a heavy toll on dusky nests and brooding females.

Meanwhile, overall goose numbers in the Willamette Valley and Lower Columbia region were on the rise as other subspecies of Canada geese began to winter here. But the population really started to spike in the 1990s.

The cackling geese had arrived.

Much smaller than their dusky cousins, cackling geese are also far more numerous. Historically the birds spent the winter in the Central Valley of California, but for unknown reasons they decided to move their cold-weather address to the Willamette and Lower Columbia.

All of them.

“We do not have a clue on what caused the shift, but when the shift happened, it happened pretty fast,” said Bradley Bales, the migratory game bird coordinator for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

“We had geese in places we never had them before,” Bales added. “It put us in a very awkward and bad spot.”

Today there are seven varieties of Canada and cackling geese that winter in the Willamette Valley and Lower Columbia. By the most recent estimates, their numbers total between 250,000 and 300,000. Perhaps two-thirds of those — roughly 180,000 — are cacklers.

Competing interests

While the valley’s wild goose population was exploding, so was Oregon’s grass seed industry, which has brought an additional 120,000 acres under cultivation in the last 20 years. Today grass seed pumps more than a half-billion dollars a year into the state’s economy, according to the Oregon Seed Council.

And geese, everyone agrees, just love grass.

While they tend to favor waste corn in the fall, the hungry birds turn to grass as winter turns to spring and the young shoots start to grow. In addition to being abundant in the valley, grass provides a rich source of the proteins and lipids geese need to withstand the rigors of their epic northward migration.

The Willamette Valley refuge complex provides forage for wintering geese through a program that encourages farmers to plant grass and other crops on refuge land. The farmers get to use the land for free, but they have to accept the damage inflicted by goose grazing.

Some fields get through the season relatively unscathed, but others can be wiped out.

“Goose use is so high at Ankeny that we’ve struggled to keep cooperative farmers in business,” said Jock Beall, a U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service biologist stationed at Finley. “That’s a problem because if they can’t make the bottom line, they drop out.”

The Willamette Valley refuge complex, created when there were around 25,000 geese wintering in the valley, now consistently supports 60,000 to 100,000 of the birds each year, Beall said. With today’s much higher populations, that means tens of thousands more geese must fan out across private agricultural land to find food.

Unlike farmers in the co-op program, off-refuge farmers can use a variety of “hazing” tactics to drive geese off their land, from setting up predator-shaped cutouts to firing shotgun blasts into the air or even rigging timer systems for propane cannons.

But farmers say hazing doesn’t always work, and many chafe at the rising losses inflicted by geese — especially at a time when the price of fuel and fertilizer is climbing steeply.

“Our grass seed farmers are the winter hosts, so they’re paying the price for this enormous increase in the goose population,” said Dave Nelson, executive secretary of the Oregon Seed Council.

“The basic problem is the West is regulated by the East and people who have no concept what it takes to successfully farm in the Willamette Valley,” Nelson said. “The goose populations need to be reduced, but the wildlife agencies’ hands are pretty well tied by the courts and the Congress.”

Hunting could bring the numbers down, but the take is currently limited to just 10,000 birds in Oregon. The restrictions are primarily to protect two species: duskies and cacklers.

Dusky numbers have stabilized in recent years at around 20,000-25,000, but that’s still below the management target of 30,000.

At 180,000, the cackler population is much healthier, but the target for those birds is quite a bit higher still: 250,000.

While Oregon farmers would love to see the cackler population shrink, there’s another group that has a vital interest in seeing the numbers rise: the Yup’iks, an Aleutian people living near the cacklers’ breeding grounds in Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.

There are about 20,000 Yup’iks in Alaska, and their culture is still largely based on subsistence hunting. Cackling geese and their eggs make up an important part of the Yup’iks’ diet. Their tribal hunting rights are guaranteed by the Pacific Flyway Council, the international body that coordinates migratory bird management along the West Coast of North America.

That leaves state wildlife managers like ODFW’s Bales caught in the middle.

“It’s a very awkward position, trying to balance out depredation and subsistence harvest (of cackling geese),” he said.

“We’re probably at around 175,000, maybe 180,000, but the population target is 250,000 — and I have not seen any willingness on the part of Alaska natives to lower that number.”

Best-laid plans

Reducing goose populations isn’t the only way to help farmers. The Pacific Flyway Council has had a plan for controlling goose depredation in the valley in place since 1998.

It’s a good plan, Bales said, with provisions for improving survival rates for duskies on their Copper River nesting grounds (which would allow increased hunting of other Canada geese) as well as a program to provide hazing supplies to Oregon farmers.

The problem is funding.

“We need about $1 million a year to fully implement the plan,” Bales said. “We’re getting none.”

So for now, at least, it appears grass seed growers in the Willamette Valley will have to resign themselves to losing a portion of their crops to wintering geese.

For Nusbaum, who farms a patchwork of refuge land and his family’s private ground in south Benton County, it’s a numbers game.

His private land isn’t being hit too hard yet, but it gets a little worse each year. And about a third of his grass seed acreage is on the nearby William L. Finley refuge, where losses typically run 25 to 30 percent but can spike up to 50 or even 80 percent in a bad year — a significant hit to his bottom line.

“I wish they’d control the goose numbers more,” he said.

“When I was a kid, we didn’t have geese. The geese have found us, I’d say, in the last 15 years.”

That’s when the cacklers made their move, abandoning their longtime wintering grounds in California for the green fields of Oregon.

Wildlife managers agree it’s a problem, but they say there’s only so much they can do. The geese, they point out, have a mind of their own.

“Birds, they can just pick up and fly,” said USF&W’s Beall. “You can’t just make ’em stay and do what you want ’em to do.”

Bennett Hall can be reached at 758-9529 or bennett.hall@lee.net.