If informal guests to the Bear River Migratory Hen Refuge had been paying consideration this month, they may have noticed a wader-clad duo hanging off the bow of an airboat and pulling Canada geese out of the Nice Salt Lake. The airboat would rip throughout the water, solely slowing so one lady may snatch a goose because it swam by the shallows. And it was all within the identify of science.
The 2 goose catchers in query are volunteer wildlife biologists with the Utah Division of Wildlife Sources, and their unorthodox method appeared in an Instagram video shared June 14. The 2 had been serving to with the company’s goose-banding program, which for many years has offered ample information for the state’s wildlife managers.
DWR’s waterfowl banding program has been in operation since 1965, program lead Wealthy Hansen tells Out of doors Life. He says that whereas there are a number of alternative ways to catch and band geese, the DWR typically focuses its efforts on the shallow flats of the refuge as a result of the geese can’t dive all the way down to unreachable depths there. As an alternative, the birds submerge themselves and swim alongside the shallow lake backside, the place volunteers can simply snatch them. The geese are fastidiously caged, delivered to shore, banded, and launched inside a number of hours.
“The marshes of the Nice Salt Lake are so shallow, anyplace from a foot deep to two-and-a-half toes deep,” Hansen says. “In the event that they’re on deeper water, they’re actually powerful to catch. We really must set a entice up on shore, put wing partitions out, and funnel them into the entice … however we’ve got all these wetlands related to the Nice Salt Lake, so we’ve got quite a lot of waterfowl biologists, and quite a lot of airboats and gear.”
Photograph courtesy Utah DWR
Hansen and different members of the waterfowl workforce do observational flights over the refuge a few week earlier than a banding day to get an concept of the place the geese are congregating. Flocks have a tendency to collect on any one of many refuge’s many impoundments, Hansen says, on the northeast nook of the Nice Salt Lake. As soon as the biologists have an concept of the place to go, they launch their airboats and encompass the flock, singling out people to suit with sturdy stainless-steel leg bands.
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“As soon as an airboat pulls up on them, they have a tendency to duck out of the way in which, so we put volunteers on the entrance of the boat to pluck them out of the water,” Hansen says of the techniqu.
Hansen estimates that roughly 10 % of the geese they seize in a typical yr are already banded. They’ll run these distinctive band numbers by the USGS Hen Banding laboratory database and replace what organic info they will. This is similar useful resource waterfowl hunters ought to use to report the banded birds they harvest to allow them to add to a rising physique of analysis across the birds, Hansen factors out.
Photograph courtesy Utah DWR
Many of those banded geese are captured a number of instances, and Hansen says a handful of birds between 17 and 21 years outdated find yourself within the DWR’s banding stations yearly. They lately captured a Canada goose that was first banded in 2005.
A part of the explanation a few of these geese stay so lengthy is as a result of they’re a resident inhabitants,” Hansen says. “There are some geese that migrate by the world, Hansen says, because the Nice Salt Lake and the bigger Bear River watershed present essential stopover habitat for birds within the Pacific Flyway. However the resident birds that stick round are inclined to clever up fairly rapidly.
“They stay loads longer than most individuals would suppose,” Hansen says. “These birds usually go to town as quickly because the taking pictures begins … These birds are fairly sensible, and to outlive that lengthy they know when to get to town they usually understand how lengthy to remain within the metropolis.”
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Hansen says 2024 marks the 59th yr of the DWR’s banding program. And over all that point, they’ve dealt with a whole lot of 1000’s of birds.
“I believe we’ve got one of many longest-running banding initiatives within the nation, and I do know we’ve banded extra geese than every other state west of the Rockies,” Hansen says. “From 1965 by 2003, the state had banded about 65,000 geese. I took over in 2004 and we’ve banded one other 60,000 since then. So we’ve banded about 125,000 geese. It’s a reasonably large effort … and it’s helped us loads.”