America Did Too Good a Job at Saving Canada Geese
Throughout the town of Rochester, Minnesota, where I grew up, 18 themed goose statues (each an imposing 5 feet tall and 525 pounds heavy) stand sentinel. Airport Goose wears aviator goggles. A press pass hangs around Newspaper Goose’s neck. Library Goose cosplays as William Shakespeare. At amateur baseball games, Rochesterites cheer for the Honkers. In our local newspaper, the movie reviews once issued ratings on a scale from zero to four honks. The city’s flag features three Canada geese flapping over the skyline.
Clearly, Rochester loves its geese. But also, sometimes, it can’t stand them. The city’s estimated 6,000 Canada geese regularly irritate their human neighbors with ill-tempered honking and steadfast production of up to two pounds of poop daily that foul parks and regularly close beaches.
“That’s the No. 1 complaint in parks since I’ve been here,” Paul Widman, the director of the city’s parks-and-recreation department, told me at Silver Lake Park last October, the sound of honking overhead. “Geese.” In Rochester, and in many other cities and suburbs, local geese have become almost too wild for human liking—largely thanks to decades of our own meddling.
Rochester’s avian love-hate affair began about 100 years ago, when Dr. Charles Mayo, of the hospital dynasty, brought 15 Canada geese to his family’s estate. Around then, the Canada from the skies. In Rochester, the birds thrived. Fifteen soon became 600, as the flock attracted migrating brethren to stick around. When a power plant started warming Silver Lake in 1948, the gaggle stopped migrating and became year-round residents. In the early 1960s, the Silver Lake goose count first reached 6,000—one bird for every seven human residents.
