Geese on Kin Beach.

(BEN BULMER / iNFOnews.ca)

Invasive Canada geese have long since taken over public parks and beaches in Kamloops and the Okanagan, dropping poop everywhere they go, damaging crops and contaminating local water sources, and their populations continue to increase. 

Most people aren't aware they are not a local species and there is an open season on the birds three times per year in the Kamloops area and twice per year in the Kelowna area, and while the geese are a tasty food source and hunting could help manage their populations, it isn’t that simple.

“Knowing lots of other hunters, people either hunt goose or they don’t, goose is a specific thing to be into, it’s a completely different skill set,” said Kamloops hunter Jason Beers. “I don’t know many people who have done it, I have three or four times.”

Beers said there are two ways to hunt Canada geese.

“People do what’s called puddle jumping where you know where the bodies of water are, you move around hoping to spook the birds into the air and shoot them,” he said. “Or you set up what’s called a ground blind in a field and set up decoys and you wait them out.”

The province is divided into nine administrative hunting regions, that are further broken into 225 management units for the purpose of game management.

Kamloops is located in Region 3 where open seasons for Canada geese are in 26 management units from Sept. 8 to Sept. 20, Oct. 1 to Dec. 23 and March 1 to March 10 with a bag limit of 10 birds per season.

The Okanagan is located in Region 8 where it is permissible to hunt Canada geese in 18 management units twice per year between Dec. 20 and Jan. 5, and Feb. 1 to March 10 with a bag limit of 10 birds per season. 

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Ryan Kole is a director for the BC Trappers Association for Region 8, and goes goose hunting every year. Kole and Beers both said the most limiting factor for hunting geese is access.

“Being that geese tend to be either in the city limits or on private property, the most difficult part of getting access to the geese is access to the geese,” Kole said. “If you don’t own a farm or orchard then you don’t have the opportunity to hunt them.

“Hunting friends of mine have permission to hunt at farms here in Kelowna, but there are hundreds of hunters and only a couple of farms allowing it.”

Hunters need to abide by all restrictions of their city and the management unit they are in.

“There are lots of geese but they stick to certain habitats,” Beers said. “You have to specifically say, ‘I’m going out to hunt geese,’ because you’re either sitting on the water and hoping they show up or you’re having to get access to private land where they’re landing. There’s not really a lot of grassy fields that are public land.”

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Beers went out goose hunting last March and had to hike a long way past private land to a legal hunting area.

“I had to hike for an hour into the middle of nowhere,” he said. “At that time of year, ducks and geese are only on water and most of the water is frozen. It’s very limited and difficult.”

Harvesting Canada geese is a time-consuming process and the meat isn’t favourable to everyone’s tastes.

“It’s greasy, oily meat and you only eat the legs and breast,” Beers said. “When you butcher a goose if you’re going to eat the legs you have to butcher the whole animal very specifically, it takes a lot of work to get it down to the breast and legs.”

Kole finds goose meat to be delicious and makes pastrami out of it, brines it and smokes it into a charcuterie style of treat.

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“A lot of people make their geese into pepperoni and sausages and a lot cook it like you would a duck breast,” he said. “Like any wild game, a lot of work goes into harvesting, processing and preparing it.”

Canada geese populations in the Okanagan have been a controversial issue for years with some wanting to spare the birds while others find them a nuisance.

There are roughly 2,000 to 2,500 geese and 400 nests in the Okanagan Valley, said Okanagan Valley Goose Management Committee coordinator Kate Hagmeier in a previous interview with iNFOnews.ca.

Every year her team addles the eggs of non-migratory geese — that is shakes them or coats them with biodegradable corn oil which results in unhatched eggs — but despite these efforts, Hagmeier said the geese population is expected to keep rising by about 10% every year. 

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Many of the geese at local parks and beaches were introduced in the 1960s and 1970s from other parts of Canada as part of controlled introduction programs, and are not natural to the local ecosystem. 

Before European colonization, Canada geese nested in southwest Ontario and the southern prairies, but in the early 1900s unregulated hunting drove the geese to the brink of extinction.

Wildlife officials responded by breeding the birds, often introducing them to new areas, and as agricultural and urban spaces developed, geese flocked to open pastures and urban areas for easy food and fewer predators.

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There are now millions of them in the country, and in warmer parts of Canada, like Kamloops and the Okanagan, the geese stay year-round.

When asked if hunters would hunt more geese if bag limits were increased and open season extended, Beers said he didn’t think it would make a difference.

Kole said it would be something he would support.

“I would rather see hunters go out and utilize the geese rather than just cull them like what’s happened in the past,” he said. “I find them to be excellent table fare, and with the price of groceries, if hunters want to go out and have a good time and shoot geese and get delicious food afterwards, I would support ways to make that easier for them." 

— With files from the Canadian Press

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