Big Goose on Campus: Local Gaggles Interfere with the Safety of Parkside Students
Written by: Emma Foley and Alix Fogarty
Interviewer/Editor: Olivia Springsteen
Photography/Videography: Megan Vittone
The University of Wisconsin-Parkside is located in a park-like setting with over 700 acres of land; covered with trees, streams, ponds, and prairies. The latest problem on campus has been Canadian Geese’s presence on campus.
Each fall and spring roughly 100,000 to 200,000 geese flock to Wisconsin according to Environmental Education.Org. Therefore, every semester students are faced with geese, and the increase in Goose hostility has impacted campus safety and productivity.
Dr. Gregory Mayer, a Professor in the Biological Sciences Department has a bachelor’s degree in biological science and a master’s and PhD in organismal and evolutionary biology.
He’s been at Parkside since 1992 and teaches classes like vertebrate zoology where students do surveys of the animals that live on a certain site. In the class, students observe animals and write reports detailing their findings.
Mayer shares, “the history of the Canadian geese is interesting, this used to be flyover country, they bred in the north and wintered in the south.”
Mayer has noticed that the geese were breeding on-campus since his arrival to the UW-Parkside campus in the 1990s; they stopped flying over and now breed here.
Mayer furthers, “I haven’t seen a ground nest in years, but there are plenty of roof nests”. Mayer believes that this may be due to the increase in small predators that made it dangerous to nest on the ground.
Small predators eat gosling, (geese babies) and sometimes the hawks try to catch the adult geese. However, geese are not easy prey as they are quite large. Mayer notes that the “geese are such an artificial element here.”
Mayer says, “The geese are not needed for our ecosystem as there are not enough large predators to keep the population at bay.” Right now he notes that “the population is crazy high” for geese.
This has been contingent on the notion that geese don’t have to leave if they can make their homes here. All that geese need to survive is access to water and grass. Mayer notes, “We created this home they never used to live here” and “now they live here year-round.”
A study done by the University of Urbana-Champaign in Illinois goes into great detail about why the Canadian geese are choosing to stay the summer in the midwest, instead of flocking back to Canada.
There are a couple of reasons why Canadian geese stay in highly populated areas. One reason is they are less likely to be hunted and the second is because cities emit more heat.
Between 2014–2016 researchers tracked forty-one geese in the Chicago area and kept track of whether they would stay in the area or move. When geese would stay in urban areas they would have around 100% success rate of getting through the winter, but when they would go to rural farming areas, this dropped to about 48%.
With the extra heat emitted from city life, (even though food resources may be lesser) and the lack of hunting done in these areas, a lot of these geese are choosing to stay in more populous areas to ensure their survival, and procreate.
Parkside Students Kammi Kringle and Samantha Feiler went into detail about the issues they have come across as a result of the Canadian geese on the campus.
Kringle is a sophomore theatre arts major and she utilizes Parkside’s outdoor walkways to go to and from class when the weather is permitting. She has had a couple of close calls with the geese and claims that she has indeed felt threatened.
“One time when [she] was at [her] dorm last year [she] needed to go and get dinner and [she] walked out of Ranger Hall and there were 3 geese and [she] turned around and went back into [her] dorm because [she] couldn’t cross paths without feeling in danger.”
Something that would make Kringle feel safer is if there was access to goose repellent to keep them away, or if there was some other way that she could defend herself.
Feiler, a Senior majoring in Theatre Arts, has had close encounters with the geese throughout her time on campus. Most of her geese encounters have been between Wyllie and The Rita, or by the back entrance of the theatre.
Feiler notes that “they will hiss at you if you get too close. [She’s] never felt so threatened. [Her] friend even got into a fight with one”
Parkside’s Canadian geese are a species that has migrated and created homes here. Mayer notes that we are creating a “completely unnatural environment that geese have thrived in”. Geese are not considered an invasive species, and it is important to understand why they are here, and what we can do to ensure their prosperity as well as student, faculty, and visitor safety.
Below is a short video about the study done by the University of Urbana-Champaign, along with an abstract from the study.
Study: Canada Geese Migrate To Cities In Search Of Safety Not Food — video Dailymotion
