By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, August 20, 1997; Page A01

It has been 6,000 years since the Keewatin ice cap retreated from the coastal marshes around this Hudson Bay village, and for much of that time a prolific number of plants and animals shared what sub-Arctic Canada had to offer. Plants evolved with a type of organic antifreeze in their cells, and each summer's thaw revealed lush spreads of marsh grass, sedges and flowers; birds trimmed and fertilized the lawn, and foxes ate the birds.

It was, say scientists who have studied the area intensively for 30 years, a system both finely balanced and broadly diverse, given the climate, from dozens of species of plant life to the top local predator, the polar bear.

Today, however, there's trouble on the tundra.

In the past three decades, an explosion in the population of snow geese has reduced thousands of acres of once thickly vegetated salt- and fresh-water marsh to a virtual desert, driving out other species and threatening to overwhelm an ecosystem that would take decades to rebound.

The deteriorating situation has been tracked in detail by a team of scientists who have manned a field station deep in the Manitoba marsh each summer since the late 1960s. The situation is so serious that they want to call out the cavalry. At this point, they say, the only way to save the tundra is to kill the geese – lots of them.

"The population has escaped hunters' control and predators' control, and there is no sign of it doing anything else" but increasing, said University of Toronto botanist Robert Jefferies, who has been part of the field research team at La Perouse Bay since 1974.

Jefferies and other members of a joint U.S.-Canada panel have recommended killing at least half the continent's snow geese through increased hunting in the United States, where the birds spend the winter, and in Canada, where they return in summer to breed and rear their young.

Under the proposal currently being studied by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and its Canadian counterpart, hunters would be allowed to shoot the distinctive white birds all year, as many as they want. They would be allowed to bait migrating flocks into fields, use electronic calling devices to lure the birds, and possibly even enter America's network of national wildlife refuges in search of their prey.

And if hunters cannot kill enough of the birds, wildlife officials say, there has been serious discussion of asking for help from the military, or even introducing disease to "depopulate" a species that, resistant so far to sickness, increased predation and other natural population controls, has climbed from fewer that a half-million in the 1960s to more than 3 million today.

The birds may be majestic in flight and their annual arrival anticipated – along Maryland's Eastern Shore, the plains of Iowa and the swamps of Louisiana and Texas – as one of nature's grand events. But on the ground, in the marshes where they breed, they've become a pest, fattened for the winter on American grain, clustering farther south to avoid high-Arctic weather and increasing their numbers with an annual population growth rate of 5 percent.

"They are very successful nesting birds, and they have shown the ability to devastate environments," said Paul Schmidt, chief of migratory bird management for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and co-chairman of the Arctic Goose Joint Venture, a panel of scientists and regulators established to study the snow goose. "There is a problem to be dealt with. . . . The challenge will be to convince people . . . to appreciate a problem that is thousands of miles away. The damage that has occurred here is significant. [The geese] are hurting other organisms," particularly shore birds deprived of the habitat the geese are destroying.

The damage is obvious to the few hundred humans who live in this area year-round. "We're expecting the geese to land on the city square any day," said John Bilenduke, deputy mayor of Churchill, a city that once buzzed with military personnel stationed at a U.S. missile testing range but now relies on polar bear tours and a grain elevator to stay afloat.

It is obvious from outer space, where satellite photos show the goose damage as a wide, red strip around the coast of the Hudson Bay. "Any effect you can see from orbit I would argue is a big one," said Peter Kotanen, a University of Toronto botany professor.

Schmidt said wildlife officials plan to consult with public interest groups and hold hearings over the next year. They hope to have measures for dealing with the geese in place by next fall.

The practical issues are difficult enough. Unlike Canada geese, snow geese are not a preferred game species. Many hunters don't think they taste as good. Refuge managers said it also may be difficult for hunters alone to control the population because the birds travel in large flocks, quickly learn to avoid decoys and will not stay in one place long enough to be killed in large numbers.

"I am not sure there is much we can do with it," said George O'Shea, assistant manager of the Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Delaware. "They come and go as they desire. . . . If you open an area to hunting, they will go to a private field and tear it up. . . . They adapt and learn very quickly."

O'Shea said the flock of snow geese at Prime Hook has increased to as many as 100,000 birds, compared to only a few thousand in the late 1970s. It is a sight so impressive that the local Chamber of Commerce wants to start an annual snow goose festival.

There will be political hurdles as well, Schmidt said. Many migratory bird species are declining in North America, their habitat converted to farms and housing subdivisions. After spending money and effort building refuges, establishing wetlands laws and encouraging conservation efforts to preserve wildlife, Schmidt said, it will be hard to sell the idea that a specific species should be suppressed.

Schmidt said he also expects strong opposition from those who challenge the ability – and the moral right – of scientists and government officials to set the population level for a wild species and kill off the excess.

Biologists estimate that if 15 percent of adult snow geese are killed each year, the overall population could be cut in half in several seasons, with little danger of overkill or other miscalculation.

It is better to wait for a natural population crash as the geese run out of food and acceptable habitat, responded Susan Hagood, an analyst for the Humane Society of the United States, than to guess about how many birds should die. After a recent tour of the goose nesting grounds around La Perouse Bay, east of Churchill, Hagood said the humane society will oppose the proposed goose kill.

The snow goose nesting grounds in North America include northern Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba and parts of the Northwest Territories, "and it is a little hard to believe that geese at their current population level could affect that entire area," Hagood said. "Let nature take its course. The population will continue to increase. It will probably then crash at some point, and that will give the tundra the break it needs."

So far, however, there is no crash in sight, only the bare ground that flocks of hungry geese leave behind. Areas along the western coast of Hudson Bay that were once prime feeding ground for the birds are now mud flats. Scientists estimate that as much as one-third of that traditional habitat has been destroyed.

Compounding the problem, the snow geese move inland and change their diet when the coastal grasses are gone, invading fresh-water marshes as well. Land that once bloomed with gentle blue gentian and white Grass of Parnassus flowers now has a dust bowl quality, covered with mats of a purple weed and the skeletal twigs of dead willow bushes.

The goose's success, in and of itself, might not be cause for action. However, the scientists involved contend that they are only surviving in such numbers because man has given them an unfair advantage. Since the 1960s, said botanist Jefferies, the geese have been gorging on rice and grain in the southern and southwestern United States, returning north fatter than ever and better able to survive the northern Canadian winter.

There is more land in cultivation now, the grain is better, and farmers, to conserve soil, no longer plow their fields under in the fall, Jefferies said. The result is a virtually unlimited supply of food for the birds to eat during their months in America.

"All the evidence is that man caused the booming of that population. We created a niche for [the snow goose] to be more competitive with other species," said Jefferies. "If we are not effective in four or five years, we are going to have to use our imagination."