Greater Snow Geese cover the sky over Greenwich, NJ (Photo L Niles)
Arctic nesting snow geese winter in great numbers in the Cohansey River drainage. Huge flocks, numbering in the thousands, pile into our area in early winter and stay until they begin their long journey back to the tundra. This year they didn’t arrive until the mid-December, another sign of our relatively mild winter, but normally they arrive in November. They don’t make the heroic and lonely journey of red knots flying across the often storm-tossed western Atlantic, but fly instead in great numbers over land with the coordination of a British expeditionary force. They fly only to the southern edge of the northern winter. This brings them to both the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays.
The flocks are huge, sometimes blanketing the sky in white, the air filled with the sounds of rushing wings and a hoarse call amplified by a thousand voices. Driving down one of our country roads through orchards and fields of sprouting winter wheat, one might think a freak snow had fallen but soon recognize the dense flock of foraging snows. And when they are disturbed they jump into the sky at once, the air filled with white, black and sound. This area has been blessed with this spectacle for ages.
I say this because this is my story about these birds, a blessing for us to enjoy and protect. There is a more pernicious story about these geese, one that is fast robbing them of thier essentail worth and beauty. Most often it goes like this: they are a pest spreading across the agricultural landscape, a grazing hoard devouring all in their path, leaving behind shit and devastation — think of how we thought of Canada geese 30 years ago and now. 
Snow Geese forage in a field of young winter wheat near Greenwich, NJ (Photo L Niles)
There is some truth to the story, but it is a complex story that challenges how we envisage modern game management. The Greater Snow Goose composes most of the eastern flyway population, while the Lesser Snow Goose concentrates on the mid-continent flyway. Both populations have grown dramatically in the last 30 years, some estimating by over 300%. The Greater Snow Goose once numbered 50,000 in the 1970s. Now there are over 1.4 million flying from breeding areas in the eastern Canadian Arctic to our region to overwinter. The growth in both populations is almost directly a response to the widespread shift in agriculture to fall-planted cover crops and winter wheat. Winter survival largely determines population levels in geese — increase survival and population goes up, decrease survival and the population goes down.
Here in Greenwich, NJ, the geese graze winter wheat but also the grass growing in the stubble of last summer’s soy and corn. Few people recognize how much vegetation grows even in the dead of winter, but the Snow and Canada geese know it intimately. In heavy snow they will graze the marsh often turning productive spartina marsh into mudflat. Bad, but not without value. The migrating shorebirds appreciate the extra bare mud, and the bay marshes are as productive as a farmed field. Overall, there is little harm done here.
Winter wheat a few weeks after planting in the late fall.(Photo L Niles)
Snows cause greater problems in the Arctic where they are literally eating themselves out of house and home. Their growing numbers create an overwhelming pressure on the tundra vegetation, and over-grazed tundra vegetation, once destroyed, takes decades to recover. Vital breeding habitat all over the Arctic is being lost to the detriment of Snow Geese, shorebirds and many other species. What should be done?
