Can Anything Stop the Explosion of Snow Geese in the Western Arctic?

On a soft stretch of tundra,  where Alaska’s Colville River seeps and braids toward the nearby Beaufort Sea, Dan Ruthrauff bends to examine the sedges. His rubber boots squelch in the wet give of mossy ground on this August evening. Every blade in sight is gnawed, its tip dried brown. “This used to be a meadow,” he says, gesturing to a mile-wide area where Lapland Longspurs, plovers, and sandpipers once flourished in lush, calf-high vegetation. Now it’s a putting green, shorn by one of the Pacific Flyway’s fastest-growing colonies of Lesser Snow Geese—birds that, until recently, hadn’t nested on Alaska’s coastal plain in significant numbers.

Ruthrauff, a shorebird biologist at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Alaska Science Center, and his colleague Vijay Patil, a goose expert, have been coming to this remote field camp most summers since 2015. They bring a hodgepodge of scientists to study birds and habitat in one of the world’s most fragile and rapidly warming regions. When they started, Snow Geese weren’t part of their research. “By dumb luck, we bumbled into this Snow Goose explosion,” Ruthrauff says.

In 2017, Ruthrauff and Patil counted around a dozen Snow Goose nests on the roughly 400-acre study plot nearest camp. Five years later they tallied more than 300. “It was wall to wall with Snow Goose nests,” Patil recalls. “As you were hiking, they went to the horizon.” By 2023, the colony—which now spans the Colville Delta—had grown to 40,000 adult geese, aerial surveys showed. Biologists from the North Slope Borough (a county-like body of villages in this majority-Iñupiaq region) recorded similar trends on the Ikpikpuk River Delta, just west, that began a decade earlier.

The trend is worrisomely familiar. Although such a dramatic increase is new to the Western Arctic, it mirrors the earliest phase of a devastating cycle of Snow Goose expansion, ecosystem destruction, and population collapse that has already played out in the Central Arctic, despite efforts to reverse it. Over the past half century, that region’s booming flocks made the Lesser Snow Goose one of the most abundant waterfowl species on Earth—and stretched North American wildlife management strategies to their limit. Ruthrauff says that in the West, now “you can see history repeating itself.” 

While no one knows if this region will suffer the same degree of destruction, Ruthrauff and other biologists believe the time to prevent that possibility is short. Wildlife managers are already raising questions about whether and how to intervene, and the data Ruthrauff and Patil are gathering on the delta could help provide answers. But a larger question looms: Will we break the cycle? 

Few people ever visit the northernmost places that migratory waterfowl depend on. Western scientists didn’t see a Snow Goose breeding site until 1929, despite years of searching—though Indigenous people have long coexisted with these birds. Even today researchers don’t travel to the farthest-flung breeding colonies. 

The rest of the year, though, these white or sometimes blue-gray birds create spectacles that many in the Lower 48 know well, amassing on wetlands and fields as they travel long-established routes: Each fall, in the Pacific Flyway, Lesser Snow Geese from Alaska, northwest Canada, and Russia fly in long bursts to wintering grounds that stretch from Washington to California. In the two midcontinent flyways, sprawling V formations depart from Canada’s Central Arctic and head for Southwestern and South Central states. In the east, Greater Snow Geese, a larger subspecies, stick to the Atlantic seaboard, starting in Greenland or eastern Nunavut and flying as far as North Carolina.

I first witnessed a winter congregation of Snow Geese at a refuge in the floodplains of New Mexico’s Rio Grande. By dusk the water was white and honking with tens of thousands of them. Photographers hugged tripods that held lenses larger than their thighs, and families bundled in blankets. A hush fell over the marsh, then the birds took off in a spontaneous combustion of wings, curling upward from one side of the flock to the other until the entire sky was geese. They arced over us, then back, and resettled on the water in a seething layer of life. Cameras snapped. Sandhill Cranes squawked. People gasped in awe.

Such a show makes it hard to believe these birds were once so rare that, in 1916, hunting them was banned. By the 1960s, they’d made a stunning recovery. As midcentury American farmers consolidated wheat, corn, and rice onto ever larger monocrop acreages, the adaptable birds shifted from winter wetlands onto those easy-eating fields. Every spring they returned fat to the Arctic to breed. Every autumn even more flew south.

In the 1970s, researchers began warning that this wasn’t the success story it seemed. Geese graze by tearing plants out by their roots—a behavior called grubbing that makes them especially destructive. Swelling colonies in Manitoba left barren swaths around Hudson Bay, portending ecosystem collapse that could harm ducks, shorebirds, and even Snow Geese themselves. By 1975, when states reopened Snow Goose hunting, the midcontinent population had grown to an estimated 1.6 million birds. In the ’80s it topped 5 million; by the late ’90s, 10 million.

Robert Rockwell, an ecologist who has studied Snow Geese in Manitoba since 1968, and other leading waterfowl scientists called the phenomenon an embarrassment of riches: an anthropogenic problem that people would have to solve. The potential ecological devastation made headlines, but the plight of the birds also struck a chord. Although experts warned it might be too late to control the population without large culls, public sentiment was strongly against them. Waterfowl managers had to explore other avenues.

In 1997 the Arctic Goose Joint Venture—a United States–Canada collaboration of scientists, wildlife managers, government officials, and conservationists—initially put everything on the table. The ideas they outlined included paying hunters to shoot more geese, legalizing commercial harvest, instituting large-scale culls for food bank donation, and encouraging First Nations communities to take more eggs. (A longstanding ban on egg collection under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, lifted two years prior, was part of the United States’ and Canada’s systematic oppression of Indigenous practices and a possible factor in the goose’s exponential rise.)

But as the group acknowledged, most ideas—especially those most likely to work—were expensive, were logistically difficult, or risked public pushback. So federal agencies implemented only a few, issuing orders that allowed hunters higher bag limits, additional hunting tools, and expanded harvest seasons. Even these measures proved so controversial that animal rights groups in both countries sued to stop them. They took effect in the United States only after Congress, pressed by scientists like Rockwell, passed the 1999 Arctic Tundra Habitat Emergency Conservation Act.

The law created unprecedented hunting access in the Atlantic and midcontinent flyways, where flocks were growing fastest. As a result, eastern hunters curtailed Greater Snow Geese growth, keeping them at fewer than 1 million—short of the management target of 500,000, but relatively stable. For midcontinent geese, though, intervention came too late. Officials had hoped hunting could halve the population by 2005 by harvesting more than 5 million birds. But as experts foresaw, hunters just couldn’t keep up. By 2014 goose numbers doubled again, surpassing 21 million. 

The only palatable tools had failed. Though the joint venture had advised reconsidering other strategies under such circumstances, decision-makers’ fear of public backlash proved insurmountable. Soon after, midcontinent geese began their long-foreshadowed collapse. Overgrazing wasn’t the only factor: Climate change also made Central Arctic conditions more hostile, says Mitch Weegman, a University of Saskatchewan biologist who oversees one of Canada’s largest goose research stations. At that site, on Nunavut’s Karrak Lake, strengthening storms decimated entire generations of goslings, and soon adults stopped coming back. By 2022 the midcontinent population had fallen below 5 million, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) estimates.

Goose numbers had finally plummeted, but the birds left behind altered ecosystems. It was “the fulfillment of my fears,” says Rockwell. While some areas are showing signs of recovery, their rebound is expected to take decades. Other swaths of affected habitat, meanwhile, are likely beyond recovery. 

Around the time midcontinent colonies started crashing, biologists in Alaska, California, and Washington began issuing their own warnings, echoing Rockwell’s from decades before. The long-stable Pacific Flyway population was growing, and fast. The region’s largest colonies are in Canada and Russia, but they’re difficult to access, due to geography and war—making Alaska’s North Slope one of the best places to investigate the boom. 

Near camp on the Colville Delta, we walk south, past our tents and electrified bear fence to an area where Snow Geese haven’t yet nested in large numbers. The comparison to the barren, muddy northern plot is stark: Here, we find plovers, sandpipers, phalaropes, and ptarmigans hidden in rolling mounds of grasses and willows. Jaegers fly overhead, likely stalking the birds below.

Around us, the season is shifting: This week the sun began setting for the first time since spring, and birds, foxes, caribou, musk ox, and grizzlies are preparing for fall. Now that Snow Geese chicks have fledged, flocks have ventured across the tundra to find more food. We hear them honking from behind a low, permafrost-lifted ridge. They can’t go far; the adults are molting, so they are briefly rendered flightless. That’s why we’re here now: It’s the short annual window when these scrappy birds are easiest to catch.

Over four days, this small crew aims to band 2,000 Snow Geese and Black Brant, a West Coast conservation priority species that’s especially vulnerable to habitat degradation. Such banding excursions provide data that wildlife agencies rely on to guide management decisions, including annual hunting rules. For Snow Geese, it could also help make the case for taking other conservation measures.

On an overcast morning, I squeeze behind Patil into the back seat of a helicopter to begin a long day herding and handling geese. The pilot takes us low over the tundra, above polygons of green ridges and small ponds and mudflat expanses that stretch between river and sea. “If you see a bunch of white dots on the ground, give a shout,” Patil says over his helmet mic. “I’m looking for a few hundred in a group.”

He spots a knot of geese to our right, then points the pilot toward a bigger group farther on. “There’s another group over here, too,” he says. “Goddamn, they’re everywhere.”

Patil singles out a flock and we set down nearby. After the pilot shuttles the rest of the team and gear over, Patil goes back up, helping the pilot coax nearly 200 slowly running geese toward a V formation of biologists and netting set up below. Eventually, the birds funnel into a small pen and the team sets to work. Zoey Chapman, a FWS biologist, wrangles squawking geese and goslings around the pen. She’s the smallest person on the team, but each time she chases them into a frantic pile, she comes up with three or four geese tucked under her arms. “Like the rodeo,” another biologist jokes.

For hours Chapman passes birds over the netting, handling downy gray goslings and fighting, biting adults with a single-handed grip above their wings. Patil, Ruthrauff, and two others receive them, recording their sex, age, and weight. They crimp a numbered aluminum band around each bird’s leg, then drop the goose into a second holding pen. When they’ve banded every bird, Patil opens the pen. A few geese scramble out, then the whole flock follows, murmuring and wing-flapping as they run toward open tundra.

For years to come these bands will help biologists monitor this dramatically shifting population of Snow Geese, which can live to age 30. Patil can track each bird’s fate thanks to a simple yet powerful system run by USGS and the Canadian Wildlife Service: Hunters report the bands on geese they harvest, and biologists submit IDs of geese they recapture during research or banding operations. These data, combined with aerial surveys, help wildlife agencies model and estimate population size, distribution, and demographics.

Banding won’t, however, reveal how Snow Geese affect the ecosystems they inhabit. To that end, Ruthrauff had planned to run a spring survey documenting the nest success of every species in the study plots. He last did this in 2018, before the goose explosion, so his data from that year offer an invaluable baseline for comparison. He’s near certain that any bird that requires cover from predators has declined since Snow Geese arrived, and if he could collect the data to show that it would provide agencies with information they need to take action. Funding such research, however, can be as hard as actually conducting it. After years of trying, Ruthrauff finally secured $70,000 to run nesting surveys in June 2024. Then a looming government shutdown forced him to cancel the fieldwork.

Ruthrauff reset his sights on 2025 and joined the team for another season of banding. At the end of four long days—our clothing goose-scratched, our hair flecked with bits of feathers—we pack up camp and fly south. In a few weeks, legions of Snow Geese, including more than 1,000 sporting shiny new bracelets, will follow.

When Chris Sybrandy hears Snow Geese arrive on his family’s dairy farm in Washington’s Skagit Valley in autumn, he feels more anger than awe. “They have a place in God’s creation,” Sybrandy says, “but it’s gotten to the point where I kind of hate them.”

More than 100,000 Snow Geese now overwinter across this valley, a major agricultural center. They can level an entire field of winter wheat or feed grass within hours. If they descend on the 100 acres where Sybrandy grows forage crops for his cattle, it could cost him $90,000 a season. So far he’s managed to avoid such large losses—with considerable effort. One recent winter, he says, “I would spend five nights a week on my four-wheeler chasing the Snow Geese from one field to another for hours, trying to keep them from ruining the grass.” 

Farmers farther south face even larger flocks. In California’s Sacramento Valley, where around a million Snow Geese now winter, 34 growers told University of California researchers that in 2023, geese destroyed $8 million worth of alfalfa, wheat, hay, and other grasses, not counting the nearly $300,000 the growers spent hazing birds and reseeding.

Such pressure will persist. Within two decades, the Pacific Flyway’s wintering Snow Goose population has more than tripled to an estimated 2 million. That’s almost six times the management target of 320,000 birds—a goal made even harder to attain by the many forces helping these flocks thrive. 

Some suspect that shifting land use in Western states may have inadvertently assisted geese. For example, on the Sacramento Valley’s 500,000 acres of rice fields, farmers who once burned post-harvest stubble now flood their fields instead: A state law targeting air pollution phased out burns by 2000, and conservationists added incentives to the mix. The water helps break down stubble and provides habitat for imperiled waterfowl and shorebirds, like Northern Pintails and Western Sandpipers, in a region where development has diminished seasonal wetlands and drought is now the norm. But Snow Geese flock here, too, and they may get most of their calories from rice fields—though these growers don’t usually grouse about geese, which help them by eating stubble.

Unlike with the midcontinent population, climate change is also giving the species a boost in the Western Arctic. Ruthrauff and colleagues have documented these opportunistic birds arriving in Alaska earlier, nesting sooner, and having larger clutches in warmer years. What’s more, thawing permafrost is creating more salt marshes across the North Slope, expanding habitat where Snow Geese love to graze.

The Pacific Flyway is also gaining birds from an unexpected source: other flyways. Since storms and other factors cut breeding success to near zero at places like Karrak Lake, surviving adults have sought out new sites, Weegman says. Some of those birds, research suggests, now nest on Baffin Island, hundreds of miles farther east, where local researchers say colonies have been growing. Others seem to be crossing paths with western birds in migration and following them home, ending up in places like the Colville Delta. “These birds are little magnets to great habitat,” Weegman says.

To get a clearer grip on the new goose reality, Weegman is using increasingly powerful computers to develop techniques to assess these disparate shifts on a grand scale. Using banding data, including Patil’s, his team is building a population model for the entire continent, rather than individual colonies. Seeing the whole system, researchers expect, will let them connect the dots between every region, better understand what’s driving different trends, and evaluate where and how to intervene. 

Building these groundbreaking, relatively low-cost models has become a priority for the flyway councils, which guide joint management by the United States and Canada, says Joshua Dooley, a goose biologist in the FWS migratory bird management division. The models could test, for instance, whether boosting hunter harvest in the West, as managers have requested, would make a dent in populations. That question has been hotly debated, in no small part because the number of hunters is shrinking. In California, where most Pacific Flyway geese winter, hunting license sales fell 70 percent between 1970 and 2020. 

The models might also help western managers reconsider one or more of the other interventions conceived of in the ’90s but never taken seriously—including, perhaps, that most unpalatable action: a science-backed strategy to cull geese.

If the models confirm that the recent boom is driven by the birds’ newfound success in the Arctic—rather than a better winter buffet—and that boosting the recreational harvest won’t help, the path forward may remain cloudy. Implementing any new approach would likely be costly and complicated. Taking conservation or management actions in the Arctic, for instance, is so expensive and logistically difficult that Weegman believes no one would recommend it. For decision-makers to employ any new approach, public sentiment would also need to evolve. Society would have to prioritize studying and protecting fragile, if rarely witnessed, Arctic habitats and, if the science calls for it, to support managers in devising and carrying out difficult measures.

For his part, Rockwell hopes that a more holistic approach will eventually prevail. “Snow Geese are just trying to cope with a world that’s changing around them,” he says. He has long supported hunting expansion as one solution, but he’s not convinced killing more geese is the only answer. In Manitoba’s now grubbed-out barrens, “How do we get more grass to grow?” he muses. “I often say, ‘It’s the ecosystem, stupid.’ It’s the whole thing. Our job is to try to keep a firm grip on how the entire ecosystem is doing.”

This year, Ruthrauff and Patil were  poised to pursue just that on the Colville Delta. Ruthrauff had again secured funding to repeat his 2018 nesting surveys and was sorting out the logistics of remote, weekslong fieldwork when, on his first day in office, President Trump ordered hiring freezes and later spending freezes that blocked the way. Frustrated, in April Ruthrauff took a deal from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency to retire early, one of thousands of federal employees to do so. “I now sit and worry about my colleagues, like Vijay, who are too early in their careers to do anything but hang on,” he says.

Patil returned to the delta to band geese in late July, though his future was in limbo. Earlier that month the Supreme Court ruled that the administration could move forward with extensive federal layoffs. As Audubon went to press, Patil thought he could be let go, along with most USGS biologists, at any moment. These layoffs, and other cuts the administration has asked Congress to make, could also shutter the USGS Bird Banding Lab, without which all American banding would halt.

For Pacific Flyway Snow Geese and the managers charged with conserving them, these disruptions come at a critical time. Lessons from Greater Snow Geese in the East proved that the simplest, least controversial measures can work if they’re applied early. Midcontinent flocks, meanwhile, showed that Snow Geese have the potential to adapt and surpass all human expectation, eventually crossing a threshold beyond which control is much harder. Already, some western colonies have been doubling every two to three years. This means that even just a few years with diminished federal expertise could have long-term ramifications for wildlife, people, habitat, and the geese themselves.

In September, not long after Patil left the Colville Delta—perhaps for good—millions of Snow Geese Arctic-wide put fresh flight feathers to use, launching their southward migration. By Thanksgiving, their spectacular flocks will alight on fields across the United States, including, in all likelihood, Sybrandy’s Washington dairy farm.

For now, he says, all he can do is chase them, forcing birds from field to field. It is a chase that myriad human factors have forced on this species elsewhere, pushing them from wetlands to monocultures, Karrak Lake to Baffin Island, the Central Arctic to the West. 

And just chasing geese, Sybrandy says, doesn’t solve any problems. It only shifts them to someone or someplace else. 

This story originally ran in the Fall 2025 issue. To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.