One of the splendors of the Eastern Shore in winter is watching thousands of snow geese rise in a cloud of white from a field of stubble, honking and flapping their black-tipped wings as they whoosh skyward at dusk in deep Vees and head toward their roosting spots in the salt marshes. They invoke a primal feeling of awe.
While they breed above the Arctic Circle in the tundra of Greenland and Siberia, Alaska and Canada, the only place snow geese winter is in the southerly parts of North America, returning decade after decade to the same traditional areas, making them a special treasure on the Eastern Shore.
But they are a treasure that was once threatened. At the turn of the 20th century, snow geese had been hunted almost to extinction, not only on the Eastern Shore but throughout the United States. In the 1800s, market hunters killed huge numbers of ducks and geese in factory-like operations to sell to the fast-growing metropolitan populations on the East Coast and the Mid West. By 1900, there were fewer than 500,000 snow geese left worldwide, and for the greater snow goose, which is the dominant sub specie here on the Eastern Shore, an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 remained.
Recovery began with the Migratory Bird Act of 1918, an international treaty to limit hunting, and the establishment of wildlife refuges, including Blackwater in 1933 and Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge in 1943 to preserve the wintering grounds of snow geese on the Atlantic coastal flyway. Today numbers in this region have risen to about 550,000 and globally to about 15 million, according to the Partners in Flight.
So successful have the conservation efforts been that wildlife experts since the 1970s have warned snow geese now are threatening the ecological balance. They are voracious eaters and with the rise of large-scale agriculture, the geese learned to take advantage of waste grain left scattered in fields after harvest, allowing more snow geese to survive the winter. Some farmers consider them a pest. As their numbers have swelled, they have started to denude the tundra regions where they breed from March to October, degrading areas they share with nesting sandpipers and other birds, said Michael Stein in Bird Note, an independent media outlet on birding.
“It’s a tricky conservation question: protect the overabundant Snow Geese, or protect the tundra habitat the geese now degrade,” Stein said.
The United States and Canada eased hunting restrictions in 1997, but the American Ornithological Society in 2019 reported that it has done little to reduce the overabundance of snow geese.
They remain a protected bird, however, and they still face other threats, among them loss of wetlands, lead poisoning from bullets, and collisions with airplanes and power lines. The warming climate also could reduce their current breeding grounds by at least 50 percent as temperatures rise above 1.5 degrees Celsius, according to the National Audubon Society.
An emerging threat is the H5N1, a highly contagious and deadly strain of avian influenza virus, which is spreading rapidly among waterfowl including the snow geese and has infected some domestic poultry. The Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources said in a Jan. 30 press release that it is receiving increasing reports of sick and dead wild birds on the Eastern Shore, and preliminary tests indicate they were infected with H5N1.
February is the last month to see snow geese on the Eastern Shore. By the end of the month, huge flocks will have gathered to fly northward to their Arctic breeding grounds. They are a harbinger of the changing seasons and for Native American cultures, a symbol of great power, perseverance, and determination.