Geese Banding Adventure

Yesterday (Thursday), was designated as a day for us to go help NJ Fish and Wildlife with geese banding. So, the plan was to "forget about bats" for the day, and instead, focus on geese. Slight fly in the ointment happened when the contractors caught that little brown bat the night before, and so Jenny ended up staying behind to track it. But the rest of us, and the two turtle interns, all drove up to meet the NJ Fish and Wildlife folks. It was certainly an interesting experience. :-D

Basically, every year, they spend about a week and a half going around to different places all over NJ, corralling geese and banding them, and writing down any recaptures they get. It is done during a time when the geese are molting and so they cannot fly. 

At the first site, corralling the geese took a long time. So we spent much time just waiting for the people in kayaks to round up some geese and herd them over to where we wanted them. When they got close, I had to hide in some bushes, which brought back good memories of crouching down in the brush with Ingrid when we were working with the Sandhill Cranes. :) When told, I came out, picked up this fence type thing and we all walked towards the geese and pretty much boxed them in. It is a little bit challenging to explain. Hopefully some pictures will help (although we didn't get to take many as it was just way too hectic).

geese in enclosure after being corralled, getting ready to band

For the first group, I recorded recapture data. So, the other interns went into the pen, picked up geese, and read their band numbers aloud to me, with me repeating it back to them. Then any birds that were unbanded were given to the NJ Fish and Wildlife folks so they could band them. We then proceeded to go to three other sites, doing the same thing. Let me just say, way more exhausting than you might think at first. Those geese are very strong and can be quite fighters. So when you are trying to hold them by their 'shoulders' with one hand so you can brace their foot with the other and read the band number, it is quite draining on your arm muscles after a while. Definitely fun though. Oh and of course, trying your best not to let the geese completely beat you up... they love to try to bite you. Which you can't really blame them, since we are pretty much man-handling them lol. I somehow managed to only have one significant bite. Some of the others got really beat up. But I also did a lot more data recording than direct handling, so that probably had something to do with it. It would be amusing though cause suddenly you'd have goose pee or poop all over you, and maybe a little blood here or there depending on how much they bit or scratched you. We all looked pretty lovely by the time we were done. :)

It was definitely an exhausting, but extremely fun day. Nice to get some experience handling larger birds. Reminded me of when we banded one of the crane chicks right before it was able to fly. Obviously the cranes are bigger. But yeah, reminiscent for sure :)