Winter geese dwindling along Texas coast
Waterfowlers with a passion for pursuing geese on Texas’ coastal prairies and marshes had reasons to be cautiously optimistic about the 2016-17 waterfowl hunting season. Maybe this would be the season that turned around what has been at least a two-decade run of increasing disappointment as the number of the big waterfowl wintering on the Texas coast significantly declined.
After all, mid-continent populations of just about every goose species are at or near record levels, continuing a trend documented for decades. And surveys on far-north nesting grounds and migration staging areas indicated the birds had a successful nesting season, inflating flocks with young-of-the-year birds most susceptible to decoys and calls.
Weather also seemed to be working in Texas goose hunters’ favor. A series of strong cold fronts that produced snow and freezing temperatures pummeled the upper reaches of the Central Flyway during November and December — just the kind of winter weather that traditionally has forced geese to head south, aiming for the sweep of Texas coastal prairies and marshes that for millennia was winter home of as many as 90 percent of the Central Flyway population of snow, white-fronted and Canada geese.
And those traditional wintering grounds were in the best shape they’d been in years. A wet year had much of Texas’ coastal marshes and prairies rich in the native vegetation on which wintering geese grub and graze. Even better, geese arriving on the Texas coast this winter would find more rice fields than they had in at least five years. This past year, Texas farmers planted 30,00040,000 more acres of rice than in the previous year. That extra 45-60 square miles of rice would provide premier wintering habitat for geese, with the fields providing high-energy waste grain and rich volunteer vegetation.
Maybe this would be the year geese would return in large numbers.
“I really expected to see a substantial increase of geese on the coast this year,” said Kevin Kraai, waterfowl program leader for Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. “Across the board, goose species are doing better than ever. We saw a significant increase in rice acreage. The habitat is in good condition. And we’ve certainly had the cold weather.”
But the hoped-for surge in geese on their ancestral wintering ground along the Texas coast did not happen.
In late December, TPWD biologists conducted the agency’s midwinter goose survey, an annual aerial survey of the major goose wintering areas along the Texas coast designed to provide long-term population trend data. This year’s survey, which had pilots flying standardized routes while trained TPWD staff in the plane counted wintering geese encountered along those transects, produced yet another in a string of sobering results.
The survey’s preliminary data indicate a total goose population index of approximately 233,000 geese. That’s just slightly down from the 246,000 geese counted in the four coastal goose zones a year ago. That’s a lot of geese. But it’s a mere shadow of the more than 1 million geese that wintered on the Texas coast as recently as the late 1990s.
“It was disappointing and, frankly, a little surprising,” Kraai said of the coast’s mid-winter goose numbers. “But it’s what we been seeing for years. It’s a sad state of affairs if you consider that just a few years ago, there were as many as a million geese wintering on the coast.”
No species exempt
The staggering decline has cut across all species and groups of geese wintering on the Texas coast.
Canada geese have been the most affected. Canadas, which include more than a dozen subspecies, have all but disappeared from the Texas coast over the past three decades. The large races of Canada geese — birds weighing as much as 10 pounds — began abandoning the Texas coast in the 1960s and had all but disappeared by the 1970s. But the smaller races of Canadas — cackling geese and some of the mid-size Canadas — were common wintering birds into the 1980s, when the midwinter counts estimated more than 100,000 Canadas along the Texas coast.
Those numbers plummeted through the 1990s. Over the past five midwinter surveys, fewer than 1,000 Canada geese were encountered during the December flights. (The midwinter counts do not suppose to give a precise estimate of the number of geese wintering in an area. The estimate is more an index number used to gauge long-term population trends.)
The number of whitefronted geese — specklebellies — wintering on the coast also has shriveled. Through the 1990s, the midwinter survey counted 85,00-140,0000 whitefronts. This year, that number was about 20,500. And that was up from the previous year -—the midwinter whitefront count on the Texas coast has averaged about 16,000 birds over the past six winters.
The decline in the winter population of snow geese — lesser snow geese, blue geese and the smaller Ross’s geese — has been the most obvious to most coastal goose hunters.
Snows have been the most common wintering goose on the Texas coast, and they remain so. But the numbers of these white geese wintering on the Texas coast has dropped by more than 60 percent in less than two decades.
Some winters through the late 1990s saw as many as 1.2 million snow geese on the Texas coast. Those numbers began tanking in the early 2000s, falling from 1 million in 1998 to as few as 181,000 in the 2014 midwinter survey.
This year, the midwinter survey estimated about 213,000 snow geese on the coast, down slightly from 231,000 the previous year.
The goods news — if there is any — is that the approximately 75,000 geese (65,000 snow geese, 10,000 whitefronts) counted in Goose Zone 3, the area roughly covering the coastal prairie from Galveston Bay to Matagorda Bay and south of US Highway 59, was twice what it was this past year.
That increase, Kraai said, was a bright spot.
“That zone is where the biggest increase in rice production was,” he said. “That’s not coincidence. Geese have clearly adapted to human-caused changes in the landscape. They winter where they can find food and open water.”
Increasingly, they don’t have to come to coastal Texas to find that.
Habitat options
The amount of highquality wintering habitat on the Texas coast has shrunk over the past decades. Rice production has fallen from highs of more than a half-million acres as recently as the 1980s to less than 200,000 acres for the past five years.
At the same time, production of agricultural crops on which geese have come to depend has exploded in regions to the north. Arkansas plants more than 2 million acres in rice, and corn and other small-grain crops blanket much of the Midwest.
That’s where many of the geese that once wintered on the Texas coast can be found. The geese have shifted their wintering areas.
“Geese have proven incredibly adaptable,” Kraai said. “When they can find open water and abundant food, they’re not going to move any further south than they have to.
“It’s a trend we’ve been seeing. When you have a landscape covered with corn and there’s a powerplant lake or some other body of open water for them to roost on, that’s where they’ll stay, even if that’s in central Illinois. They go where they find the resources they need, and they’re finding those resources before they get to Texas.”
Also, recent years have not seen the intense, longterm freezing conditions that would lock up open water and food resources, forcing the birds to Texas.
“The cold snaps are cold, but they’re usually of short duration,” Kraai said, noting the birds might temporarily relocate but return as soon as the weather moderates.
“Across the board, goose species are doing better than ever — their numbers are way up,” Kraai said. “The irony is that we’re seeing fewer of those birds wintering on the Texas coast.”