A Little Rant About Habitat Modification and the Consequences

This little rant is prompted by another Patch blogger on

It's long, so if you don't want to read it, here's a summary: a park rounded up and gassed hundreds of geese last year without telling anyone and it sparked public outcry. The park-goers loved feeding the geese and watching the goslings grow up and freaked out when they were killed but they may be culled again this year despite knowing the public does not want it to happen (and despite the fact that there are precious few geese left in the park). 

Now, I'm a wild bird rehabber and goslings rank high in my favorites. Anyone that doesn't melt at the sound of their cheerful whistley chirps or the sight of their fluffy yellow downy bodies running with their silly little wings held high doesn't have a heart, in my opinion.  But my problem with this sort of thing is more than just "baby geese are cute." 

What I find most unforgivable in stories such as these is that we humans modified the habitat to make it ideal for an "undesirable" species, then we complain afterwards that, wait a minute - we made it like that for our enjoyment, not for any other species! How dare they enjoy it!  Geese don't live in the woods, so if we would prefer not to have them around, we could stop deforestation of the forested area in which we live and they wouldn't be here.  Instead, we (for some inexplicable reason) enjoy mowed grassland which happens to be ideal geese habitat, so the more we cut and mow, the more geese will be around. 

But I find myself asking, so what? Who cares if they're around, why kill them? Reasons like "they poop too much" or "they may cause plane crashes" have been given. The first is simply laughable (really? Poop is your excuse for slaughter?) The second was given in the case above but the population was found to be non-migratory, meaning they didn't fly.  They would thus never have caused a plane accident so that reason is really just an excuse. 

The white-tailed deer over-population problem is a similar. We modified the environment, fragmenting NJ to such an extent that mountain lions and wolves, natural predators of deer, could no longer live here, so the deer population exploded. Then we whine about how many deer there are and come up with all sorts of ideas on culls of the population as a band-aid instead of fixing the problem of fragmentation!  It's silly and maddening to those of us who are ecologists by trade.

Anyway, solution:  stop cutting down trees. Leave the environment the way it is (NJ is the temperature deciduous forest biome - emphasis on forest). I've never understood why people love to move into our area and cut down trees left and right. If you don't want to live in a forest, move to the mid-West and live in a grassland. Move to the Southwest and live in a desert. But leave our trees here in the forest alone and all these human-wildlife conflicts will cease to exist.