Banding Geese

On June 28th and July 3rd some of us went with Dad to where he works and volunteered to help band geese with the naturalist, Sonny.

These pictures are from both days.

Sonny and the assistant naturalist, Denise, had scouted around to find a couple good groups of geese and then kept an eye on them to see what their feeding pattern was.


The geese cornered.

They try to band geese now because they are going through a moult and can't fly and the goslings usually haven't developed their wing feathers yet or don't know how to fly yet.

We would try to catch the geese when they were in a pond. We had from 13-20 people helping. If the geese were next to the pond, we would spread out and try to push them into the pond so they would group together in a tight group. The canoes would push them onto the dike where we would close up on them and chase them into a pen that had been put up earlier.


Setting up the pen.



Caught!!



Sonny showing Dad how far to spread the bands to fit on the leg of a goose.

A couple people got into the pen and handed them out to others who held them, then handed them to Denise and Sonny who sexed, aged, and banded them.



L-R: Dayne (he is staying with us for the summer), Emily and her sister Hillary (our neighbors), kneeling down is Denise, and other helpers from the DEC.




Sarah (a friend). Hold on!!

My job was note keeper. I had a page where I would write down where the banding location was, the date, what we were banding -- CaGo, for Canada Geese, age which would be HY-Hatch Year, or AHY-After Hatch Year for the adults. The band number also, for instance 9548-82243. If we caught a retrap that had been already banded, they would read off the band number to me and sometimes there was a reward number on it ex. 25478. The reward bands helped encourage people to return the bands so the DEC could track the patterns of the geese. The quota for the northern part of Region 8 where we are, was 150 new geese banded. We got over 200 counting retraps also.




Hillary and I.

Occasionally there would be a goose that was a little mad and would bite, but they weren't too bad.



Brother Ben waiting.




Another group picture.

When the geese were in the pond, sometimes they would stretch their necks straight out on the water and swim around. It looked so funny. They will do that in the weeds so predators can't find them as well, but in the water.... it doesn't help. :)


Sonny and I looking over the records.



That's all for now. Look forward to a post on Peter and Amy's wedding July 7th, soon.