While there is never a dull moment here in the 'Land of Living Skies', the honking sounds at this time of year have more people looking up, as Geese are migrating south for winter. With thousands gathered recently in the area, we asked Katherine Conkin, the Provincial Game Bird Biologist with the Saskatchewan Ministry of Environment just how far these birds will travel, and how they can track them throughout their journey.
She said post-harvest fields like the ones in our area have plenty of available food, such as grain and grubs, for Snow Geese and Ross's Geese.
"There's probably a mixture, and you'll see both the traditional sort of white phase and then the blue phase, which is a little bit grayer looking," she explained. "This time of year, we have huge migrations happening through the province. A lot of these are Arctic nesting Geese, that are traveling on their way to their southern wintering grounds. They will be back next spring."
Conkin said they have not moved along yet because of the above-seasonal-average temperatures and low precipitation we have been enjoying in recent weeks. However, once the ponds freeze over and winds pick up, the geese will be moving along to warmer climates.
"Saskatchewan is kind of unique in that we actually encompass two migratory flyways," she explained. "So there's the central migration, or Central Flyway, and the Mississippi Flyway. They overlap in Saskatchewan. So the birds certainly travel on both from different parts of the Arctic."
She said Snow Geese populations spiked around 20 to 25 years ago.
"They increased exponentially, so the populations really got quite large, and there are different reasons for that, but we actually have a spring hunting season on them because they were declared overabundant. In more recent years, the production has actually been pretty poor on the Arctic breeding grounds, and those numbers have dropped substantially. There's still a ton of geese, and so we continue to have those opportunities for hunters on them, but populations have done some interesting things in the last little while."
Banding, an initiative led by Environment and Climate Change Canada, is the most common and cost-effective way to track the migratory patterns of geese. It involves a small aluminum band, applied by researchers to the leg of a goose while on the breeding grounds.
"Then we rely on hunters to report those bands on birds that they've harvested along the flyways, so we can tell where they've gone and you do that year over year over year, and you start to get an idea of the pattern."
Tracking birds before they are harvested, however, could involve devices that look like neck collars, or even backpacks the size of a mini chocolate bar, said Conkin. While they are less cost-effective, they provide useful data allowing researchers to track the birds' patterns in real time.
"So the cost of research comes into play, but one of the beautiful things about watchers on birds that are in a flyway is that we partner with counterparts across North America and amongst the flyways," she said, noting that each flyway has a technical submission platform for tracking the waterfowl.
"There are some Cackling Geese, they look like a small Canada Goose, that do have satellite backpacks and there's a couple thousand of them and so we do get weekly updates on where the birds are at and where the migration is at, and it's pretty interesting information."
Conkin explained that the backpacks will transmit a GPS location right back to the satellite in real-time, while others will store the information to be downloaded when the birds fly near a cell tower.
Tracking the birds, she explained, is to monitor populations, and different aspects of the populations, as well as evaluate the hunting and harvest of hunted species.
While none of these geese are endangered, this methodology is useful to track birds like whooping cranes, for which Conkin noted, "the numbers are doing better than they have previously."
While biologists aren't encouraging bird-watchers to try to capture geese and apply tags or mini backpacks, they do encourage downloading the e-Bird app