When Rick and I were traveling over Christmas, we happened to see a gaggle of geese on a golf course. That reminded me of a story I wrote about geese in Florida back in the Dark Ages (the 1980s).
The first thing to know about geese is that they are “Canada” geese, not “Canadian” geese. Canadians are northern (human) visitors who migrate south for the winter and bring traffic jams with them.
For many years, the Canada goose was a protected species in Florida, but that wasn’t always the case. As late as the 1950s, Florida hunters could harvest geese during the waterfowl season. Back in those years, we would have 40,000 to 50,000 geese in Florida for the winter. The Canada Goose, which is not a true goose but a brant, migrated the Gulf Coast to overwinter. In fact, St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge was established largely to provide for the geese.
Now, I have to say that while I love to hunt, and I’m making the assumption that the hunters who killed the geese also ate them, I personally don’t see the appeal of eating a goose. I kept domestic geese for a while; they’re noisy, vile creatures with the temperament of a cranky toddler on the verge of a tantrum. When I cooked one (a goose, that is, not a toddler) it was tough, greasy and gamey. But I suppose if you simmered one long enough, and seasoned it heavily enough, it might reach near-edibility.
In the late 1950s, migratory Canada geese stopped coming to Florida. On the eastern shore of Maryland, corn had replaced barley as a major crop. Mechanical corn-pickers knocked down the stalks and left grain on the ground, providing excellent feeding areas for the geese. Instead of continuing to come south each winter, the birds stayed in Maryland, in a phenomenon known as "short-stopping."
The old Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission (now the Florida Fish in Wildlife Conservation Commission, FWC) embarked on a two-phase project designed to return geese to Florida. In 1968 two wildlife biologists, Jimmie McDaniel and Dale Crider, went to Maryland and brought 900 adult geese back to Florida. The Commission confined the birds for two years before allowing them to migrate back north. The hope was that they would return to Florida in subsequent years. The effort failed when all the birds were killed during the hunting season in Maryland and Delaware.
The Commission's second attempt was more successful. McDaniel and Crider built a special trailer designed to hold 400 goslings. Every year for ten years in the late '60s and early '70s, the biologists trapped young geese from a non-migratory population in New Jersey. They banded the young birds and trucked them back to Florida. The biologists kept them in captivity until they started getting juvenile feathers. Then McDaniel and Crider would drive around northern and central Florida and play 'Johnny Appleseed' with geese, dropping them in many locations with adequate food and water available. The biologists carried birds as far south as Lakeland and released them at multiple sites around the state.
The birds increased, and they also moved around, especially to nicely-landscaped neighborhood ponds, much to the chagrin of the neighbors. Eventually the numbers increased to the point that the FWC reopened the Canada goose season in Florida, and hunters can target geese for about seven weeks of the hunting season, plus December 30 and January 1.
What of the biologists who spearheaded this project? Jimmie McDaniel went on to other positions in the Commission; when we talk about alligators and alligator hunting, he’ll figure prominently in the story.
Dale Crider, though…..if you haven’t heard of him, look him up. He was already known as the “singing biologist” before the goose project, but he retired in the early 1990s to devote full time to his music. He performed traditional bluegrass with the Florida Wildlife Boys, and by the 1970s was performing original songs with a message of environmental conservation in Florida. https://www.floridamemory.com/learn/exhibits/florida-folklife/people/?id=crider For 40 years, he was a fixture at the Florida Folk Festival at the Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park in White Springs on Memorial Day weekend. Now in his 80s he no longer performs, but he has left a legacy of music as unique as the Florida landscape.
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