Home Conserving Wildlifeconservation policy A sky white with snows (part 2)

A sky white with snows (part 2)

by Larry Niles
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In my last blog I described the growing impact of exploding Snow Goose populations and asked what can be done about it.

Some will blanch to hear that hunting is, without question, the best way to help this bird.  But each year hunters kill only about 50,000 birds, far less than the yearly production.  So even with liberal hunting seasons and bag limits, the population continues to grow.  Why aren’t hunters killing more?

Part of the reason is the skill necessary to kill Snows.  It is a tricky operation that sometimes requires hundreds of decoys to bring the birds into a field.  Another is the inefficiency of the hunt.  Here in Greenwich, NJ, one can hear a few, distant shotgun blasts in the early morning light followed by the raucous explosion of thousands of geese lifting off to another field — which is very likely unhunted. One has to question if a shorter, more organized season might be better if only because more hunters would be shooting the same flocks at the same time.

The bigger problem for those who wish to bring the population down to about 500,000 birds — the population goal set by biologists — is that hunters hate to eat Snow Geese.  The USFWS service and the state agencies have done much to get hunter to re-imagine Snows as good-eating, going so far as to produce a cookbook.   It may have helped, but the bird is an ordeal.  I’ve eaten snow goose in the Arctic while we were in the field.   After eating mostly beans and winter vegetables, fresh meat of any kind was a bonus.  Even then, it took some getting used to.

Maybe another part of the solution is to consider allowing wider access to Snow Goose meat.   Now, geese and every other game animal cannot be sold for the market.  Early hero’s of conservation, like Aldo Leopold, erected this immutable barrier to stop the carnage of wildlife for profit, and they would look at any breach of that barrier as a defeat for wildlife.  Looking at how we treat fish in Delaware Bay, I have to agree.  Most conservationists think the era of market hunting ended in the early 1900’s with the passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918.  For my part, market hunting is in full swing on  Delaware Bay fish populations where the greed of a few big players commands the system of fishery management to the detriment of species they are supposed to sustain.  Opening up a new expression for greedy exploitation of wildlife may be playing with the devil.

But there is one path.   There is a growing awareness in our Country that our methods of industrial meat production are immoral, unhealthy for humans and the environment and are, ultimately, unsustainable as global demand for meat continues grow and will double by 20501.

This awareness spawns a fast-growing segment of the food and restaurant trade dedicated to the humane treatment of a small contingent of the 60 billion pigs, cows and poultry slaughtered annually (10 billion in the US alone) for our consumption1.   Supplying snow geese for these restaurants, with young chefs who hunger for new gastronomic challenges, would be the fastest way to find new recipes that would make Snow Goose delicious; (my son, the new head chef at St Vincents in San Francisco, says “all game is good depending on the preparation”) .  More people eating Snow Geese would accelerate their successful management.   The animal that is now drifting toward the ignominy that befell the Canada Goose, might just find it’s way back to our good graces.

For me, the snow goose is already there.   They are as much a part of the Delaware Bay as Bald Eagles and shorebirds, and all deserve our appreciation and care.

1.  Bittman, Mark.  2009.  Food Matters:  A Guide to Conscious Eating with more than 75 recipes.  Simon &  Schuster, New York, NY.

 

 

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