Category

Lesser Snow Goose

Lesser Snow Geese were traditionally one of the most common geese to be seen wintering on the Texas coastal prairie. However, in the past two decades, their numbers have dropped by 75-80%. A number of factors seem to be in play. Severe droughts and irrigation cut-offs caused rapid decline in rice plantings, a key food source for the birds. Also, climate change has enabled the geese to “short-stop” their migrations and overwinter successfully further north, in Arkansas and elsewhere. Finally, overpopulation in the Canadian breeding grounds, and habitat damage there, has led to loosening of hunting controls.

Interviews

Narrator: Kirby BrownTitle: Drought, Rice, and GeeseDuration: 00:04:25Date: July 1, 2020Kirby Brown, a conservation outreach biologist for the Ducks Unlimited, has earlier worked in wildlife management at Texas Parks and Wildlife and the Texas Wildlife Association, and has helped found and lead the Lower Colorado River Basin Coalition. Here he explains how irrigation water cutoffs during the drought of 2011-15, together with a long-term, multi-factor decline in rice cultivation, accelerated the move of snow geese, as well as white-fronted geese, out of Texas, and towards Arkansas.Narrator: Tom MasonTitle: Water and Climate ChangeDuration: 00:02:52Date: June 19, 2020Tom Mason, is an environmental lawyer who has served as the general manager and general counsel for the Lower Colorado River Authority, and before that, in leadership positions at the Texas Department of Water Resources and the Texas Water Commission. Here he talks about how climate change, and better understanding of historic droughts, are undermining the ability to predict and guarantee deliveries to firm water clients, such as the City of Austin. Supplies for interruptible customers, such as rice farmers, have become even less assured. These reduced irrigation supplies and lower rice acreage have likely undercut the snow geese populations in the lower Colorado River basin.Narrator: Charles StutzenbakerTitle: ShortstopDuration: 00:06:27Date: October 15, 2009For many years, Charles Stutzenbaker served as a noted waterfowl biologist on the upper Texas coast for Texas Parks and Wildlife. Here he recalls the consternation in Texas and Louisiana about Snow and Canada geese failing to make it all the way to Texas in the fall (for instance, an estimated 1.1 million snow geese came to Texas in 1990, but only 350,000 to 400,000 by 2009). Apparently, many of these missing geese had "shortstopped" at state and federal game refuges and grainfields further north.