September goose hunting begins across much of Minnesota on Saturday, including in some parts of the metro, where waterfowlers fortunate enough to find a place to target honkers will be in position when the birds become legal fare a half-hour before sunrise.
Once a rich opportunity to get into the field before the duck opener, the early-season greater Twin Cities goose hunt has morphed into an outing that attracts fewer scattergunners — though exactly how many fewer is unknown — who have ever fewer places to hunt, and bag, birds.
One reason: Fewer geese inhabit the metro today than perhaps at any time in the past 15 years, or longer.
This is by design. Complaints by Twin Cities homeowners and golf-course operators, among many others over the past three decades, have prompted goose-eradication efforts that run the gamut: from dogs assigned to chase the birds off fairways and school ball fields, to the hiring of specialists who round up adult birds and goslings for processing and eventual disposition to food shelves and others.
Tom Keefe of Cottage Grove owns Canada Goose Management, the company that cities, park districts and others in the metro call to rid their areas of problem honkers.
Keefe agrees the Twin Cities population is a shadow of its former self. "There was a time in the goose's heyday in the Twin Cities that we would capture and remove 8,000 or so geese,'' he said. "Now it's a fraction of that.''
In 2014, his outfit removed only 600 birds, the second-lowest total since goose eradication began in 1982. More than double that number will be removed this year.
Accompanying the diminishment of Twin Cities geese has been a loss of hunting opportunities. Housing and other developments across the metro continue apace, eating up fields where September goose hunters once gathered. And the number of cities within the metro that ban or otherwise restrict hunting seems to be growing.
