Vancouver's Canada Geese Crisis
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There have been a ton of baby Canada Geese this year at Jericho Beach Park. The champion family was a two-parent family with 17 goslings. There were at least 5 more families with a minimum of 10 goslings each. Our goose population in Vancouver is growing by 18% a year.[i] Our human population is growing at 1%. At this rate, there will be more Geese than Humans in this City by the 2060s. Enjoy the next 30 years, everybody, then prepare to bow before our Cobra Chicken Overlords.
I had a front-row seat this year to one of the reasons why Canada Geese are taking over. I live about five blocks from Jericho, and two Geese Parents nested on my building’s roof. What is shocking about this is that it was an eighth-floor building! Somehow, the flightless baby goslings managed to get off my roof and follow their parents to Jericho.
I am on the top floor of the building and watched for about a month as Mom and Dad aggressively chased off other Geese that dared attempt to nest nearby. I would be working from home when, suddenly, incredibly loud, angry honking. Then I would see Dad (Males usually do most of the territory defending) explode off the roof, a fury of feathers and neck muscles, launching himself at a clueless, terrified goose on the building below me. It would usually quickly de-escalate, and the terrified visitor would defer and give space to Dad. “Sorry! Sorry! Your spot! My bad! I will go!”
As the weeks went by, I waited with excitement to see if I could see the magic moment when the goslings jump off. Somehow surviving the plummet to the ground. A lot of the “official” documentation on government or society websites says that baby geese can survive a drop from no more than 3 floors. However, anecdotally, many birders have seen them drop and survive from much higher. The record I have heard is 13 floors!
I encourage you to go find a YouTube video of goslings jumping off buildings. It sounds terrifying and dangerous, but then you consider that birds have hollow bones and, even if they can’t fly, they can glide, so maybe it’s not as terrifying as it sounds. When you go watch the videos of them falling, it is a different story! Some of the goslings can pull off the glide trick, but for most, it looks like a completely out-of-control death dive. The goslings spin around and around as they fall. When they hit the ground, they bounce multiple times. You are sure they are dead. But then they get up and run up to mom. Looking just like a child trying to be tough and show that it didn’t hurt at all, even though it very much did.
It is incredible. What makes it even more fascinating is that, even though these multi-floor death dives happen all the time, you will likely never witness one or see a video of it happening. Sure, you can find it happening for 2- or 3-floor buildings, but I’ve yet to find a video for 8 floors. My theory behind this is that the parents must purposely monitor and pick a time for the death dive such that no other living beings are around. They likely do it in the very early hours of the morning. Some of the goslings must die, or injure themselves and get quickly eaten by cats, rats, coyotes, or crows.
Next springtime, when you see a goose on top of a building, honking angrily, know that it is probably a nesting spot! A nesting spot that parents will somehow ‘ninja sneak’ their babies to the closest park with water access.
This is also, I think, where Geese get their Cobra Chicken name. It’s why they don’t seem to be scared of anybody or anything. You have to be tough to jump off a building that high after just being born.
Canada Geese love Jericho. It has one of the largest goose populations in the city compared to other parks. A typical summer day in Jericho can have a thousand geese in the Park (Stanley Park has the most, with just under 3 thousand).[ii] On many days, the geese in Jericho outnumber the people. There is a good reason for this. The Geese love Jericho for two reasons: grass and water.
Geese do what’s called moulting in the spring and early summer. This is where the Adult Geese have to replace their wing feathers and become flightless for 4-6 weeks. Moulting usually overlaps with parenting duties. Adult Geese usually can’t fly when they are raising their still flightless goslings. Mom, Dad, and the kids are all trying to grow their wing feathers as fast as they can.
In the meantime, to defend themselves – especially their plump and innocent gosling – against predators, Geese look for two things. [1] Wide, open areas with clear sight lines and [2] Access to water. With wide open areas, you can see predators and threats coming from far away, so you have enough time to do something about it, and what you do about it is: Run for the water. Most land predators can’t swim anywhere near as fast as a goose. The water is safe. This is why you will see geese spend their nights in the Jericho Pond or in the ocean. Those clear sight lines don’t matter if you can’t see in the dark.
Another thing that young goose families are looking for is a quick, easy source of protein to help them get bigger and grow their wings. The best and easiest food source for an herbivore like geese is grass. Specifically, mowed grass. The more recently cut, the better. This kind of grass will be full of new growing shoots with protein. Protein is the body builder! New leaves and stems on plants have concentrated protein for growth.
Jericho, with its vast grass fields, fresh-cut regularly in the summer, and easy access to not one but two bodies of water (the pond and ocean), makes it a perfect goose habitat.
And it is a massive environmental problem for Jericho.
Canada Geese are a national icon. Many people think they are a native bird to Vancouver. They are not! Admittedly, an extremely small percentage of the population is a native migratory species that goes south to the U.S. in the winter. Around 99% of Canada Geese are the legacy of purposeful introductions of geese to the city in the 1960s and 1970s.[iii] Make no mistake, they are an invasive species that is destroying our natural areas. And it’s not their fault; it is ours.
The First Vancouver Christmas Bird Count (an incredible source for tracking long-term birding trends) identified only 31 Geese in Vancouver in 1957. These are the native migrating Geese that likely a small handful still exist in Vancouver.
However, in the 60s and 70s, British Columbia started importing Geese from across the continent. Bringing them in to serve as game for hunting, but also for ‘wildlife beautification’ as Geese were beginning to become national icons. Vancouver brought in Geese from as far as Minnesota and Ontario. These imported Geese promptly became very confused. Their ancient migratory patterns were useless in a completely new environment. For them, it must have felt like they had been transported to an Alien Planet. All the flora and fauna were different! A whole different ocean!
Geese, as we have seen, depend a lot on parental knowledge and teaching. In this new environment, though, all the lessons passed down over centuries of goose parenting had to rapidly change. They could no longer find or reach their old nesting sites. So, really, without any other choice, they decided to stop migrating and just stay in Vancouver year-round.
Interestingly, since the imported flocks came from many different places, it also led to a lot of hybridization between these different subspecies and turned Canada Geese into the ultimate urban bird.
Reminds me so much of large cities like Toronto, where we see immigrant populations – who otherwise would not have come in such close contact – create their own unique hybrid cultures. Both merging some aspects and keeping others extremely separated. We would joke about this in my hometown city of Kitchener; those who went to Toronto became “Torontofied”. They became a mishmash of so many different sources and influences. It became impossible for them to live anywhere but Toronto. Nowhere else had the same vibrant chaos. Canada Geese are like this; they are Vancouverfied. A bird that can’t leave the city.
In the early days, hunters helped keep the goose population under control. However, soon their distinctive personalities made goose hunting less and less socially acceptable. Humans soon switched from hunting the geese to revering them.
One film that had a big impact on this is the 1996 feel-good, tear-jerker classic, Fly Away Home. Starring Anna Paquin and Jeff Daniels as a daughter-father duo that teaches abandoned goslings how to migrate south. The goslings imprint on the young Anna Paquin, treating her as their mother. Our villain, with the city’s animal control department, threatens to exterminate the geese because the city can’t have a permanent, year-round geese population. She and Dad figure out how to have the Geese follow behind Anna as she flies one of her father’s tiny, ultralight aircraft.
Quick aside here for a strange coincidence: Taking a look at the cast for this movie again, and imagine my surprise to find out the actor who played the villain, whose character did what I am doing now and advocating for no year-round domestic geese population, also came from Kitchener, Ontario, just like me. Jeremy Ratchford! This helps explain why this movie had such a prominent place in my childhood! I have come full circle here!
Fly Away Home was based on the true story of Canadian Bill Lishman, who taught Geese how to migrate with his hobby of flying small, ultralight aircraft.
At its core, Fly Away Home had a great message: Geese need to migrate. However, its real legacy was having Canadians fall in love with Geese. Having us become used to having permanent local populations. Nobody wanted to hunt the Geese anymore. The Vancouver Christmas Bird Count of 31 in 1957 jumped to 1,162 in 1985 and then 3,111 in 1995. Canada Geese were now taking over.
In the early 2000s, the Goose population reached a critical level and started becoming a real problem. Geese are eating machines and can decimate natural areas, outcompeting native species and turning fertile plant land into barren wasteland. They also defecate every 9-12 minutes. They eat and poo all day long. Watch a group of geese for 20 minutes or so, and you’ll be shocked by just how much poop they produce. No wonder the fields of Jericho are covered in it.
The bacteria from the poo can be deadly. It’s been known to make kids and dogs sick. It also puts E. coli in the water. Geese are partly to blame when Vancouver Beaches are closed. It’s a combination of the geese and the discharge from all the tankers and cruise ships. Goose Poo is one of the main reasons you don’t swim in any of Vancouver’s bodies of freshwater, like the Jericho Pond or Trout Lake.
Geese can also devastate agricultural crops. While they don’t migrate, they do fly to different parts of the city and the outskirts to look for open areas covered in tasty plants. They can cause traffic chaos as they walk in the middle of streets, not caring at all (Perhaps they do this to keep wider predator sightlines?). A large flock of geese can be deadly for Airplanes trying to land.
You’ve probably been hissed at by a goose for getting too close to Goslings. There are lots of videos online of them full-on attacking and pecking at people. Vancouver is full of small dogs who are now terrified of getting anywhere close to a goose.
Something had to be done to rein in their populations, and after much trial and error, our best Canada Goose defense was found: We steal their live eggs and replace them with dead ones. We call it Egg Addling.
This sounds like a heartless strategy at first. The argument behind it is that it is the best of the evils. Hunting and killing adult or young geese, especially in the city, would be traumatizing on both sides. Removing the eggs works well for keeping populations in check; it’s like a goose abortion or population control.
However, much like any parents aiming to have a certain number of children, if you steal an egg, the goose will just lay another one. So, we steal the living eggs and replace them with dead eggs. The goose will continue to incubate the dead eggs, not realizing they are dead, and by the time it discovers it, the nesting season will be over.
Another key part of this is that you can’t leave the nest empty of eggs. The Parent will simply start a new nest. You bring already-sterilized eggs and switch those out with the living ones.
In 2021, the Vancouver Park Board added 660 eggs. In their (detailed and interesting!) Canada Goose Management Plan, they do an incredible job of showing how they have carefully thought everything through to make it as humane as possible. Egg Addling regularly occurs in front of concerned citizens. If you aren’t familiar with the process, it would probably be extremely shocking and worrisome to see it happening in front of you. Especially if the geese are trying to protect the nest when it is happening! The Plan mentions how “crew members are trained to sensitively address questions,” but, wow, not only do these crew members have to deal with angry geese, they have to explain a nuanced animal control approach to angry birders!
Egg Addling has slowed down the growth of the geese population, but it is still climbing at that unsustainable 18% rate. The 2025 Vancouver Christmas Bird Count found 2,760 Geese, which at first seems like a sizable drop from the 3,111 in 1995. However, it was recently discovered that there are two separate species of Canada Geese! We now count these separately. Some Canada Geese are actually Cackling Geese (Branta hutchinsii), which don’t breed with Canada Geese (Branta canadensis) and, because of this, are a different species. Cackling Geese look just like Canada Geese but are smaller; they look like miniature Canada Geese and are often mistaken for young Canada Geese. Conventionally, though, we refer to them both as Canada Geese, and if you add the Cackling Geese count to the 2025 count, there are 3,627 Canada Geese in Vancouver. Showing that the population is still climbing!
The late discovery of Cackling Geese is another great example of just how chaotic the importing of Geese was during the 60s and 70s. We had no idea that we were actually importing two different species! Only discovering it years later!
Canada Geese nesting on top of private apartment buildings like mine is a great defense against Egg Addling. The city has to find these nests and then get permission from the landlord to go up to the nest to remove the eggs. Geese that choose to nest in Public Parks are by far more likely to get their Eggs Addled. The city can easily access and monitor nests in public parks. Once again, geese are protecting themselves by adapting to be more urban. The higher up the geese nest, the less likely they are to be spotted. There might be some co-evolution happening here, where geese that nest on higher floors have more offspring. Leading to more and more geese nesting on higher and higher apartment buildings, as they learn their nesting locations from their parents.
However, there is one more approach for decreasing Goose populations that we haven’t tried yet in Jericho. Since the Geese rely so much on fresh-cut grass and open areas, converting grass fields into shrubland and forest is one of the best and most natural ways to decrease the geese population. You get rid of the food source and the habitat, and very soon, geese avoid the area, and less habitat means fewer offspring.
I’ve long thought that more of Jericho should be converted into shrub or bush! There is too much open grass space that rarely gets used. Sure, maybe during a warm Friday night or the Folk Music Festival, the grass fields are packed with people, but for 95% of the year, most of that grass is literally goose food. Here we are, living in a temperate rainforest hotspot that once had the tallest trees in the world, and we aren’t trying to bring the forest back? Especially with Climate Change making our summers hotter and hotter, and more extreme weather events. We know that Forests do incredible things for cooling land areas and carbon storage. Let’s plant more Forests in Jericho!
I am not trying to be flippant here; I realize that cutting back on Jericho’s grass area would likely have a negative impact on people who make use of it. Some people wouldn’t be able to find a nice spot to sit with a view of the water. The Folk Music Festival couldn’t have as many stages or people. However, an increase in Forest Area in Jericho would be an incredible gift to plants, wildlife, and our future children. Think about it, when was the last time Vancouver grew a forest? It hasn’t happened since the 1970s. Vancouver actually has a shockingly low amount of forested area compared to other cities. We rely too much on Stanley Park and Pacific Spirit Park for our forest coverage. Can you think of another decently sized forested area (and I’m not talking a park with shade trees surrounded by grass!) outside of Jericho? Evert Crowley may be the only other one.
It shocked me when I moved here. Other cities have patches of forest everywhere, but where are all the Vancouver Forests? Let’s help rein in the exploding Canada Geese Population by turning more of Jericho Beach Park into Forest.
References
[i] Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation. Canada Goose Management Plan.2 2023
[ii] Ibdid. [Same as above]
[iii] Smith, Dave W. "Management of Canada geese in the lower Fraser valley, southwestern British Columbia." Towards conservation of the diversity of Canada geese (2000): 151-158.
