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| Charlestown has been too hospitable to Canada geese, and we must now engage in goose population control. |
Our love-hate relationship with the local wildlife
By Linda Felaco
One of the joys of moving to a rural area like Charlestown
from an urban area is getting to see wildlife other than pigeons and squirrels.
When my husband and I bought our house here in Charlestown, we looked forward to seeing the wild
turkeys and deer promised in the real estate ad. Turkeys by the dozens stroll
through regularly, though we still haven’t seen any deer on our property.
We know they’re around, though, because some of our
neighbors hire people to come around and spray their properties with deer
repellent to keep the deer from munching on their gardens or landscaping
plants.
We do seem to have some rather contradictory attitudes
toward certain types of wildlife.
On the one hand, Planning Commission Chair
Ruth Platner has campaigned vigorously for passage of the lighting ordinance
partly on the grounds that nighttime
lighting can confuse migrating waterfowl and cause them to crash-land.
But then we learned at Monday
night’s Town Council meeting that Canada geese have taken up year-round
residence here in town rather than continuing to migrate—and this is considered
a bad thing, to the point that Town Council President Tom Gentz wants to send
residents out on reverse Easter Egg hunts and have them coat the eggs with oil
in order to kill them.
Before the goose-greasing presentation, a Hometown Hero
award was presented to RI-CAN
for their work feeding the hungry. Which got me thinking: Those goose eggs
could be put to much better use. What a waste of perfectly good protein to just
kill them like that. Box ‘em up and hand them out at RI-CAN! Win-win!
Except I’ve been told that if you take the eggs away, the
geese just lay more. So the idea behind the greasing is to fool the geese into
wasting their time attempting to hatch dead eggs. To me this just seems so sad,
to think of the poor geese happily nesting eggs that no chicks ever come out
of. Why not take the eggs and leave dummy eggs in their place? Then at least
someone would get a good meal out of it.
Note that federal law prohibits harming Canada goose eggs without a permit from the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service. So you don’t want to go commando on this; make sure to sign up for the training first.
Also at Monday night’s meeting, we learned that the USFWS has effectively vetoed the plan to install a lighted
practice field in Ninigret Park for the Chariho Cowboys under the terms of the
agreement whereby the federal government transferred ownership of the land,
formerly a naval airfield, to the town, which restricts the use of the park to
only recreational purposes that are consistent with the management of the
Ninigret National Wildlife Refuge next door.
Yet at the December
council meeting, refuge manager Charles Vandemoer laid out a plan to kill
certain species of wildlife, namely deer, by allowing hunting in the refuge. As
Tim Quillen of the Parks and Recreation Commission pointed out, hunting hardly
seems consistent with the concept of a refuge.
Progressive Charlestown
has also learned that Vandemoer wants to cut down some of the tallest trees in
the refuge to allow more undergrowth to grow as bunny habitat. Granted, trees
aren’t wildlife, but they are protected
species by town ordinance. Where’s our tree
warden when we need him?
