Alaska Geese Head for Russian Breeding Program

[mastodon]

Alaska Geese Head for Russian Breeding Program

Reuters - Eighteen Alaska geese have gone to Russia for love.

The Aleutian Canada geese, part of a now-thriving Alaska population that was once on the verge of extinction, were sent on Sunday to Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula to become part of a captive breeding program aimed at re-establishing the birds in their former range.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists loaded the geese, male goslings captured on an island in Alaska's Aleutian chain, on an early-morning commercial flight bound from Anchorage to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatka.

There they will be under the wing of the Kamchatka Institute of Ecology and Nature Management and biologist Nikolai Gerasimov, who oversees a small breeding program aimed at returning the geese to the Kurile Islands.

Most of the birds were captured on remote Buldir Island, about 2,500 miles (4,000 km) southwest of Anchorage. Bringing them to Kamchatka will give new vitality and genetic diversity to the fledgling Russian program, said the federal biologists managing the shipment.

"The whole thing is just a numbers game. The more birds you can get there, the better your chances are for success," said Jeff Williams, a wildlife biologist in charge of the Aleutian Islands portion of the sprawling Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge.

The Aleutian Canada goose, native to the treeless islands, in March became the 10th U.S. species to be removed from the endangered species list.

The geese had been decimated by the fox population, which was introduced to the islands by fur farmers. Until then, the geese had no predators in the Aleutians.

After a 38-year program that included captive breeding, eradication of foxes from several islands and preservation of wintering habitat in California and Oregon, the goose population rebounded to an estimated 37,000 from the tiny remnant discovered on Buldir Island in 1962.

For the Russian-bound geese, it was a long journey.

Buldir Island, one of the westernmost spots in the Aleutian chain, was only about 500 miles (800 km) east of the geese's ultimate destination. But military and diplomatic restrictions forced them to take a circuitous route via Anchorage, adding several thousand miles (km) to the trip.

They spent most of the weekend camped out at Anchorage's Bird Treatment and Learning Center, a private rehabilitation facility, where they clustered around a water-filled children's wading pool while waiting for their flight to Russia.

[Bart_V]

hello ! My father, who is amateur ornithologist, wounders what is the scientific (Latin) name of Alaska geese. I found it an interesting topic by the way : birds have no borders. Many arctic birds come here in Belgium in september, like the Curlew Sandpiper, coming from the breeding places in the North of Siberia. They stay here in the natural reservate "Het Zwin", for a couple of days, at the belgian-NL border.
And during the winter time, they stay in the southern parts of Africa. In the time of intense Lemming populations in Siberia, the predator birds will feed themselves with them, but in poor seasons, they will attack and eat the little Sandpipers. In that time, we notice far less of those species in reserve "Het Zwin".