Biologists capture swimming geese from airboats on the Great Salt Lake

The DWR waterfowl banding program has been active since 1965, says program leader Rich Hansen Living outside. He says that while there are several ways to capture and rope geese, the DWR often focuses its efforts on the refuge’s shallow flats because the geese cannot dive to unreachable depths there. Instead, the birds submerge themselves and swim along the shallow lake bottom, where volunteers can easily grab them. The geese are carefully caged, brought to shore, banded and released within a few hours.

“The Great Salt Lake marshes are so shallow, anywhere from 100 to 200 feet deep,” Hansen says. “When they are in deeper water they are very difficult to catch. We actually have to set a trap on shore, put up wing walls and run it into the trap… but we have all these wetlands associated with the Great Salt Lake, so we have a lot of waterfowl biologists and a lot of airboats. and equipment.”

Hansen and other members of the waterfowl team conduct observation flights over the refuge about a week before banding day to get a sense of where the geese congregate. The herds tend to congregate at one of the refuge’s many impoundments, Hansen says, on the northeast corner of the Great Salt Lake. Once the biologists have an idea of ​​where to go, they launch their airboats and surround the herd, picking off individuals fitted with durable stainless steel leg bands.

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“Once an airboat approaches them, they tend to dive out of the way, so we put volunteers at the front of the boat to pluck them out of the water,” Hansen says of the technique.

Hansen estimates that about 10 percent of the geese they catch in an average year have already been barred. They cross out those unique band numbers USGS Bird Banding Laboratory Database and update what biological information they can. This is the same source that waterfowl hunters should use to report the banded birds they harvest so they can contribute to a growing body of research surrounding the birds, Hansen points out.

Many of these banded geese are captured multiple times, and according to Hansen, a handful of birds between the ages of 17 and 21 end up in DWR banding stations each year. They recently captured a Canada goose that was first banded in 2005.

Part of the reason some of these geese live so long is because they are a permanent population,” says Hansen. “There are some geese that migrate through the area, Hansen says, because the Great Salt Lake and the greater Bear River basin provide a crucial stopover for birds in the Pacific Flyway. But the birds present here usually become wise quite quickly.

“They live much longer than most people would think,” says Hansen. “Those birds typically go to town as soon as the shooting starts… These birds are pretty smart, and to survive that long they know when to go to town and they know how long to stay in town.”

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Hansen says 2024 marks the 59th year of the DWR’s banding program. And all this time they have treated hundreds of thousands of birds.

“I think we have one of the longest-running banding projects in the country, and I know we have banded more geese than any other state west of the Rockies,” Hansen said. “From 1965 through 2003, the state had banded approximately 65,000 geese. I took over in 2004 and since then we have connected another 60,000. So we banded about 125,000 geese. It’s a pretty big effort… and it helped us a lot.”