State adds spring hunting season to thin population of snow geese – Breaking News From New Jersey – NJ.com

by Brian T. Murray/The Star-Ledger

Forget global warming. An ex­plosion of snow geese is ravaging the Arctic tundra — and New Jer­sey is hoping it can help.

Beginning Wednesday, New Jersey, along with New York, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Vermont, will launch a month-long hunting season targeting the over­populating Arctic visitors.

Matt Rainey/The Star-LedgerSnow Geese take off at sunrise from Merrill Creek Reservoir.

While licensed waterfowl hunters are able to shoot at the geese during the usual fall-to-spring wa­terfowl season, this year they are getting a bonus season to help re­duce the number of birds.

Hunters will have extended hours in the field, are free to load up with extra shells and can bring down as many of the white geese as fly into their sights through April 18.

Although only about 10,000 snow geese winter in New Jersey from fall to spring, according to Ted Nichols, a biologist with the New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife, millions pass through here on their way to Arctic regions across Canada and Alaska to breed. And it is on that journey that all the problems occur — thanks to modern farming.

”It’s largely a man-made phe­nomenon,” Nichols said of the ex­ploding numbers. “Historically, they would winter in coastal marshes in the south, the southern United States and Mexico. During the spring migration, they used to stick to coastal marshes, feeding on the grasses.”

The limited food supply kept populations in check. But when the geese slowly discovered large delec­table fields of grain and corn throughout the United States they began to steer off their once-nar­row migration routes across North America. Richer foods became available everywhere, year-round, and as the geese became hardier and predators fewer, mortality rates dropped.

Large numbers of the birds are even wintering farther north than they did decades ago, including in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York and New England.

”They are stronger, healthier and returning to the Arctic in tre­mendous condition for breeding,” said Nichols. “They lay more eggs, about five or six, and hatch more young.”

And 5 million snow geese are too much for the Arctic to handle during the summer.

”They are grazing on the tun­dra, and the tundra grass is becom­ing denuded. … They are ripping up the grass by its roots, impacting the habitat for hundreds of other types of birds, as well as themselves,” Nichols said.

The geese are leaving what sci­entists call massive “eatouts,” or large, bare swaths of land that may never recover. Because some of the rarest migrating shorebirds also rely on that ecologically fragile Arc­tic tundra for summer breeding, the snow geese are under fire — lit­erally and figuratively — through­out North America.  Click link below for full story!

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