On the Sixth Day... Geese and Polar Bears. Whose game is over?
Mon, 07 Dec 2015 15:56:00 GMT
On the sixth day of Christmas you can expect to be given ‘six geese a laying’.
How wonderful! This is a gift to be treasured. Having your own free range goose eggs is brilliant. You can taste and see the difference. The yolks are bright orange and the whites form delicious compact cloud like circles in the frying pan. The geese themselves might take some looking after as they can get quite feisty and I am surely not the only one who has had to beat a hasty retreat at feeding time! They also produce extraordinary volumes of green sloppy poo that left unmanaged can turn a garden into a slime zone. So – this is a gift that keeps on giving – in both positive and negative ways!
Lets hope you haven’t been given Canada geese – these are the white and grey ones that we see more and more often around the shores of our waters and lakes. If you don’t see them, you will have seen their green poop on canal paths and lakeshores – it’s a devil to get off your flipflops! This poop is causing a bit of a problem in America, where climate change is affecting geese migration dates. The geese normally migrate when lakes freeze as they have to find alternative food. Delayed freezing means delayed migration – with the birds hanging around for much longer – giving them more time to pollute the waters with their phospherous rich poop.
While the Canadian geese themselves don’t seem to be too negatively affected by climate change just yet, there are signs that their more beautiful cousins, the snow geese, will soon be having a harder time. Madeleine Doiron and her colleagues examined the impact of climate warming on the interactions between the Greater Snow Goose and its food plants on Bylot Island, Nunavut, Canada. They found that warmer temperatures were causing a decline in plant nutritive quality and that there was a mismatch in the availability of good quality food and the hatching times of goslings, something that could devastate the population dynamics of these beautiful creatures.
Another threat to the snow goose is the polar bear! Normally the polar bear foraging season doesn’t coincide with the birds’ nesting season, but as sea ice breaks up earlier the polar bears are beginning to enjoy the lovely protein packed goose eggs as an alternative to fluffy seal pups. It is feared that this could wipe out geese populations. Robert Rockwell, from the City University of New York, reassures us, arguing that since there will always be some seasons with a mismatch between nesting times and the egg hunting polar bears, the two species could live side by side in harmony.
So what could be good for polar bears doesn’t mean game over for the gander.
