It’s a few minutes before sunrise at the Ankeny National Wildlife Refuge, and the birds are starting to wake up.

A flock of dunlins banks and wheels restlessly, pale breasts flashing in the dim purple light. Northern harriers patrol the fencelines scouting for rodents, and a great blue heron flaps majestically over an open field while two snowy egrets spar briefly over a prime hunting spot below.

Sitting on the tailgate of her pickup truck, wrapped in a parka to ward off the predawn chill, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service biologist Molly Monroe registers all of these developments, scanning the skies with binoculars. But her attention is focused on something else.

She’s listening to the geese.

You can’t see them yet, but they’re out there, in the thousands, roosting on the open water of several large ponds in this corner of the refuge, located in the Willamette River floodplain midway between Albany and Salem.

You can tell the geese are there by their voices, a swelling cacophony that’s already loud but is about to get a whole lot louder as the big birds leave their overnight sanctuary for their feeding grounds on the refuge and in the surrounding fields.

That’s why Monroe is out here: to count the morning flyoff.

She has two mechanical counters to help her keep track of geese on the wing — one for individual birds and another for multiples of 10. But tabulating the feathered hordes of Canada geese in flight is a tricky business at best.

“I use lines,” she explains, gesturing toward her points of reference. “I use the railroad track as a line and I use Buena Vista (Road) as a line, so I just tally ’em as they cross my lines.”

After years of practice, her fingers are programmed to fly over the keys of the counting devices, which Monroe calls her “tallywhackers.”

“I can use tens and I can use hundreds and, if it gets really crazy, I can pretend I know what a thousand geese looks like,” she laughs.

The sun, meanwhile, is starting to climb over the eastern hills, and the clamor of the roosting geese is getting louder and more urgent. At 7 a.m. on the nose, a small flock of geese takes flight.

“There’s the first one,” Monroe announces, rattling off the morning’s first few clicks on her counter.

As the clouds take on a rosy glow, flight after flight of geese rises off the water, their voices mingling into a steady din.

“That’s one of my favorite sounds in the world,” Monroe says without pausing from her tally. “I just love to listen to the geese take off.”

Then, as if a unanimous decision had been reached, the rest of the geese take off at once, leaping into the air like a feathered cyclone, wings thundering as individual flocks spin off from the main mass and scatter in all directions, honking wildly.

Monroe lets out one loud and joyful whoop, and then for awhile the only sound is the steady staccato of the counters.

By the time the flyoff ends, Monroe has tallied about 5,000 geese, but most of the birds flew south, away from her, where she couldn’t count them. She checks in by radio with Jock Beall, another USFWS biologist stationed at the south end of the refuge.

“He got 12,000 going south,” she reports, mentally calculating what the third member of the team is likely to tally farther east.

“We’ll definitely hit 20-something,” she decides. “There’s a good 20,000 geese here.”

Crunching the numbers

The morning flyoff count is a monthly ritual at Ankeny and the two other national wildlife refuges in the Willamette Valley complex. Along with the lower reaches of the Columbia River, the valley provides year-round habitat for 7,000 to 8,000 Canada geese. But in the winter, that number swells to more than 250,000 as vast flocks migrate south from their breeding grounds in the Arctic.

With less than 11,000 acres, the Willamette Valley refuge complex can’t accommodate all those birds. But it does take some of the pressure off grass-seed farmers, whose fields can get hammered by hungry geese.

Monitoring goose populations helps refuge officials make decisions about managing their lands to support migratory waterfowl while limiting damage to nearby farms.

For Oregon’s $500

million-a-year grass seed industry, goose depredation is a serious concern. In the spring, the birds gorge themselves on the young, nutrient-rich shoots, storing up fat and protein for their long northward migration.

“That’s what they’re designed to eat,” said Brandon Reishus, a game-bird biologist with the Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife. “They’re grazers by nature, and we’ve got a lot of food sitting here in the Willamette Valley that they’re pretty fond of.”

The problem suddenly got worse about 10 years ago, when the state’s expanding grass-seed acreage collided with the unexpected arrival of the cackling goose, a subspecies that inexplicably switched its wintering grounds to the valley from central California.

While cacklers are the smallest subspecies of Canada goose, they’re by far the most numerous in this region. Now, after a successful season on their Alaskan nesting grounds, there are even more of them.

“Their estimated population is up about 20,000 birds from last year, to about 190,000,” Reishus said.

And can they ever cut a grass seed field down to size.

“Their beak’s just like a little clipper,” Reishus said. “They’re like a living lawnmower.”

They’re also protected. The mallard-size geese and their eggs form an important part of the diet of the Yup’iks, an Aleutian people living near the cacklers’ breeding grounds between the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers in Alaska.

The Yup’iks’ right to take cackling geese is protected by a treaty, but current numbers don’t allow for much of a harvest. Historically the birds’ population was around 400,000, and wildlife managers are trying to boost cackler numbers to a more sustainable level.

“The population’s been growing at a slow increase over the last five years, but it’s still below the target population,” Reishus said.

“The target is a quarter-million.”

Finding a balance

That kind of math doesn’t always pencil out for Willamette Valley farmers, despite efforts such as the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s cooperative farming program.

Nearly half of the acreage in the Willamette Valley refuge complex is set aside for that program, under which farmers agree to plant crops used for forage by geese. The farmers pay nothing for using the land, but they are restricted from driving off the geese with propane cannons or any of the other hazing techniques available to off-refuge growers.

The idea is that there will be enough of a crop left after the geese fly north to make it worth the co-op farmers’ while.

But after three years of trying, it hasn’t worked out that way for Leon Eichler, who farms about 1,500 acres in the Ankeny National Wildlife Refuge in addition to his own land near Amity.

“The first year I went in there with stars in my eyes,” Eichler said. “I plowed and replanted and got hammered and didn’t make hardly anything.”

Since then, Eichler said, he’s tried various things to make farming on the refuge pay off, such as switching to no-till planting to save on tractor fuel and changing his crop mix to include beans, oats and hay as well as annual ryegrass for seed.

So far, he says, he has yet to see any profit for his pains.

“I’m just trading dollars,” he said.

And he’s been frustrated by some of the red tape and restrictions that come with operating on federal land. For instance, he said, refuge managers won’t let him use treated sewage to fertilize his fields, even though a neighboring grower is seeing substantial yield improvements with no ill effects.

“I look at it with a farmer’s eyes, not a goose-lover’s eyes,” Eichler said.

Still, he’s not ready to give up just yet.

Normally he’d pay around $100 an acre to lease good annual ryegrass ground, so he figures getting it for free should be a winning proposition — if he can just come up with the right approach.

“I haven’t hit a home run,” Eichler mused. “But one of these days something’s going to hit that’s going to be good for me and good for the geese.”

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