The giant Canada goose was thought extinct until a flock turned up in 1962
Written off as extinct in the 1950s, the giant Canada goose reappeared as a small wintering flock in Rochester, Minnesota. Breeding programmes followed, and today the species is so abundant around golf courses and parks that many towns treat it as a pest rather than a conservation success story.
Branta canadensis is the familiar goose with a black head and neck, a white chinstrap and a brown body. Linnaeus described it in Systema Naturae; the genus name comes from an Old Norse word for a burnt, or black, goose. On average it is the largest living member of the true geese, with a wingspan of up to about 185 cm. One exceptional giant male weighed 10.9 kg with a 2.24 m span, the biggest wild goose of any species ever recorded. Males honk, females give a shorter, higher hrink, and the birds use ten distinct calls.
Classification has been messy. In 2004 American ornithologists split off the smaller cackling goose as its own species, and British ornithologists agreed the following year. Harold Hanson, who had rediscovered the giant subspecies, went much further and proposed six species and 200 subspecies; the zoological naming authorities suppressed his scheme after criticism from other experts.
Overhunting and habitat loss had crushed numbers by the early 20th century. After Hanson's 1962 find, a research centre near Jamestown, North Dakota, bred screened pairs in 64 pens, and by late 1981 over 6,000 of the big birds had been set loose at sites around North Dakota. Ohio, which lost its geese after the Civil War, restocked with 10 pairs in 1956; by 2015 it counted roughly 130,000, many no longer bothering to migrate.
That rebound created a new problem. Safe water beside short grass, and few predators, lets flocks settle year-round in cities, and interbreeding with the non-migratory giant form has helped. Droppings, noise, crop raids and aggressive begging, encouraged when people feed wild birds, earn the pest label. Europe has hosted them for centuries: Samuel de Champlain sent pairs to Louis XIII, and James II kept them in St James's Park.
Source: Canada goose
