Canada Goose

The Canada goose, once a solely migratory bird whose majestic V-formations filled the autumn skies, in recent years has become an all-too-familiar year-round resident of Middle Atlantic suburbs and farms, including those in Maryland.As the goose population has doubled every five years of late, the big honkers have become pests in the eyes of many people.But there is another, older image of the handsome waterfowl with the jet-black head and neck, white chinstrap, fat, cream-colored body and broad brown back.

This weekend ...* To the beloved Canada goose, it matters not whether the bag limit is one or two birds a day. They will do their thing, and there's little we can do about it.The second half of the split season opened Monday, with th daily bag increased from one to two a day, and now waterfowlers can appreciate what modern firearms deer hunters endured -- just about the worst possible weather for their sport. Moderate temperatures, light (if any) winds, and bright skies have made life for honkers easy.

THE CANADA GOOSE. Text and photographs by Kit Howard Breen. Stillwater, Minnesota: Voyageur Press. Illustrated. Index. 96 pages. $14.95 (paperback).JUST ABOUT everybody but hopeless bird-haters should like this beautiful new book by a Maryland (and Virginia) resident about Branta canadensis, the gorgeous, wild Canada geese now wintering among us in the Middle Atlantic states and elsewhere on the continent.Goose hunters, for one group, should appreciate the up-to-date goose information provided by Kit Howard Breen, a resident of Queenstown, Md., and Annandale, Va.Conservationists, for another, should admire the fact that the book has already been praised by members of the Audubon Society, the Wildfowl Trust and the Wildlife Management Institute.

GAITHERSBURG -- The Canada goose is discovering what we have known all along -- Maryland truly is the land of pleasant living.For the discriminating goose, we have it all. There are lush green golf courses to graze on, ponds to swim in and sometimes people to provide food. Best of all, you hardly ever see a guy with a gun on a golf course or around a reservoir in suburban Baltimore or Washington. With such a lifestyle, why fly back to Canada each spring?An estimated 10,000 Canada geese are now year-round residents of Maryland, and the numbers are growing every year.

Two leading wildlife advocacy groups charged yesterday that plans to relax federal regulations would lead to mass killings of resident Canada geese. The proposed rules would eliminate the requirement that state and local agencies get federal permits for specific methods of reducing the resident Canada goose population. Biologists say the bird's numbers in the United States should be cut by a third, to about 2 million. "We think this will lead to the wholesale killing of hundreds of thousands of these birds over a 10-year period," said John Hadidian, director of urban wildlife programs at the Humane Society of the United States and a former regional wildlife biologist at the National Park Service.

Recently, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said it would continue the moratorium on Canada goose hunting this year throughout the Atlantic Flyway, while the Mississippi and Central flyway states can select up to 70-day seasons.The reason the Atlantic Flyway is closed for Canada geese is that the migrant population in the east is dangerously low, and a ban on hunting is considered the best way to assist in repopulation.And if tight restrictions on hunting are any indication of what might lie ahead for Maryland and the other 12 Atlantic Flyway states, then perhaps the recent past in the Mississippi Flyway offers a glimpse of our future.

Federal officials yesterday said they will ease restrictions on hunting the migratory Canada goose population - a potential big boost to the Eastern Shore's fall economy. The decision comes a decade after the imposition of a complete ban on hunting migratory Canada geese, in a bid to save the dwindling population. The ban was lifted in 2001, but with hunters limited to one bird a day. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials yesterday confirmed that the Atlantic Flyway goose population, which breeds in northern Canada and spends winters here, has rebounded to levels not seen since 1988.

This week ...The cooler weather has brought more sea ducks into the Chesapeake. The mouths of the Choptank and Potomac River have many; also, there are some at the mouth of the Chester and Eastern Bay. The daily bag limit is five, but it takes a box of shells -- and they must be steel -- for most hunters to limit out.Calendar ...Saturday: Last day of Pennsylvania's buck season; the three-day antlerless season starts Monday.* Sunday: Mountain Club of Maryland Appalachian Trail hike in Cumberland Valley of Pennsylvania.

In past years, Thanksgiving was the season opener for Canada goose hunters, who flocked to blinds along creeks and rivers or field pits on the middle and upper Eastern Shore. But this year, the season for Canadas is closed, and hunters and guides are pursuing other options.The second split of duck season ended Friday, and the bow season for deer gave way to the start of the two-week firearms season yesterday. Seasons for duck and deer, though, apparently provide little solace for those among us who hold a special preference for the art of hunting the Canada goose.

Two months ago, Bill Harvey was traveling the rim of Quebec's Ungava Peninsula in a single-engine plane, flying just above stall speed, 100 feet off the ground.As Maryland's waterfowl project leader, Harvey's purpose at the northern edge of the civilized world was to gather information on nesting pairs of Canada geese that make up the Atlantic Flyway population.In the process of counting nesting pairs while flying over 7,000 miles of a predetermined, 400-meter wide transects from lower Hudson Bay to Hudson Strait, Harvey learned firsthand something of the rugged environment that also is home to caribou and musk ox, arctic fox and bears, and the Cree and Inuit native peoples.