T he kids are all right.
The Canada goslings, that is, the ones in the nest on the island below the pedestrian bridge between Rotary Park and the fish hatchery.
The mother goose and her eggs became local celebrities of sorts when rising water in the Animas River threatened to swamp the nest.
Things looked particularly dicey on April 21 after a week of warming temperatures.
But since then, temperatures have cooled, the water has receded and the nest remained secure, despite some precipitation that brought water levels up again.
Friday morning sunshine showed the goose still on her nest, but a closer look revealed the goslings tucked under her wing.
One climbed up on mother’s back to venture a peek at the wide world from between the tent of her folded wings.
The hatching was a matter of course to the geese, but welcome news to the scores of people, including parents, kids and toddlers, who had often stopped on the bridge to check on the nest during the past month (Canada geese eggs usually take between 24 and 28 days to hatch).
Good news as well for many locals who called Colorado Parks and Wildlife, and this newspaper, asking what could be done to remedy the perilous situation.
Perhaps prayer played a part, because the answer to the question was “nothing.” CPW has a strict policy of letting nature take its course. Besides, any effort to move the nest would likely have resulted in it being abandoned.
Canada geese tend to nest in the same place every year, and this island spot has been used before, often with success. That fact, along with assurances that Canada geese are far from endangered, did little to lessen the anxiety.
The exact numbers of Canada geese in Colorado is hard to determine, especially because many of the birds are year-round residents while others are migratory. Some estimates put the number of resident geese in the state at 20,000. There may well be more.
In many communities, large numbers of geese have taken over public parks and golf courses, denuding vegetation and making a mess with their copious droppings. While an adult Canada goose can eat four pounds of grass in a day, it can also leave two pounds of fecal matter in that same time period.
According to The Denver Post, efforts to control their numbers in that city’s parks include coating thousands of eggs in nests with corn oil, which prevents the eggs from developing. A stroll through many Colorado parks can make it hard to believe that the birds were nearly extirpated from the U.S. by the early 1900s because of hunting and loss of habitat.
Conservation efforts have been almost alarmingly successful: By the late 1990s, counts of migratory Canada geese along the Central Flyway alone, a 5,000 mile corridor of waterways that stretches from Texas into Canada, estimated the population at 1.5 million.
The fact that this visible local story had a happy ending should make us think about wildlife and the countless animal dramas that unfold out of the public eye.
It is a reminder that our lifestyles and the choices we make affect many more lives than our own – lives that are challenging enough without us making any part of that existence more difficult.
