A new goose
When the sun came up on October 27th 1995, four Moncks Corner boys and I were laying in a goose field not far from downtown Bismarck. We were accompanied by three awkward North Dakota locals who weren’t professional guides but the son of Rainbow Energy Marketing’s CEO and two of his friends. We had done a lot of business with Rainbow and a planned business trip took on another facet when I asked if they hunted.
One of the local boys whispered “Hutchies” as four smaller Canada geese came flying up the Missouri River. I started in on the goose call as everyone nestled in the downed corn stalks for final approach. The birds turned off the river and into the field where they were quickly felled by four shots from the closest three Moncks Cornerians.
Ryan, the CEO’s son, told one of his friends, “I guess we can cancel the safety lesson.”
It turns out that the awkwardness of the locals wasn’t just because they were gangly teenagers but because they had no clue that folks not from North Dakota could be so well equipped to handle a real-life hunting situation. In their world view, we were city slickers from the Atlantic Coast who needed to be shown how to safely handle a gun before being allowed to load up. We found out later that, because we were older, they were too embarrassed to bring it up and decided amongst themselves that they’d just keep their distances until they better understood how the morning was going to play out. It played out wonderfully.
For them, birds are so plentiful that none of them had ever had to bother to learn how to blow a goose call. It just wasn’t necessary to kill the then limit of two dark geese. The little bit of calling I did worked wonders on the smaller geese. After ripping into several groups of Hutchies we heard an obviously different sound. I called a group of five giant Canadas from the hills opposite the river and they aired over those of our inland group first. Representatives of both Bismarck and Monck Corner filled the air with sound and shot but, amazlingly, never did any damage. The five giants, honking louder and more excitedly, turned for the upper reaches of the Missouri. I managed a long shot at the bird in front of the “V” and rolled him with a #2 steel. He was marked on the board as 13 pounds and 0 ounces in a neighborhood bar’s Big Goose Contest. The six-pack of Dakota Beer I won was used as a daily lease fee for a nearby farmer that was plagued with pheasants. “Truth is,” he said, “I’d let you hunt even without the beer but thanks.”
Being a birder, I had studied up on the birds I could expect to see while in North Dakota including the pheasants and sharptail grouse that we hunted along with several never-before-seen birds like the Western Meadowlark and Sandhill Crane. From this, I was keenly aware of the possibility of several different varieties (subspecies) of the Canada Goose. At the time, all 11 races from the 2-pound cackler to the 13-pound giant were considered a single species. The Richardson’s race was common around Bismarck and is what the locals called Hutchies. The honker, or giant, was much more uncommon and the literature published by the North Dakota Game and Fish Department said something to the effect that a “lucky hunter may get a shot at a giant Canada goose while visiting North Dakota”. It turns out my goose luck continued into the new millennium.
The American Ornithologists Union, AOU, is the body charged with bird taxonomy; they get to name the bird species. Since the AOU is made up of people and people like to compete, the naming of birds takes on very political overtones. A graduate student trying to make a name for himself will often times make the case that two closely related birds are actually one species. These guys or girls are called “lumpers” since they want to lump several varieties of birds into one species. This is what happened when the Pacific Black Brant was lumped into a single species with the Atlantic Brant. Of course, if there are lumpers, there must be “Splitters” and there are.
It was a splitter that made the case that the Canada Goose should be split into two species; Cackling Goose and Canada Goose. It’s not just a matter of body size. The four races that are now split into Cackling Geese (Aleutian, Cackling, Taverner's and Richardson's) have short stubby bills and higher pitched voices. More importantly, though, they breed on the northern tundra nearest the Arctic Ocean with little to no breeding overlap with the seven races of Canada Goose that breed to the south of the Cacklers. That AOU accepted this split in 2004. So some ten years later, I got to write down a new species of bird on my lifelist and on my deadlist.
The seven races remaining in the Canada Goose complex are Atlantic, Hudson Bay or Interior, Giant, Moffitt's or Great Basin, Lesser, Dusky and Vancouver. Obviously, our local birds are of the Atlantic subspecies but we also get Great Basin and Hudson Bay Canadas in SC as migrants.
I look forward to, maybe one day, writing down a Cackler in the "in SC" column.
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Originally Posted by BOG
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