Radio Script
1998

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Egg Hunt
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STORY: On a recent spring day in Anchorage, Alaska, about 25 volunteers, mostly Eskimos and Indians, stepped carefully through the brush bordering the city's parks and greenbelts. They were looking for goose eggs, and by the end of the day, they had collected some 30 dozen of the fist-sized eggs. The eggs were brought to nursing homes, shelters and food banks to be given to Native elders, many of whom had not eaten a goose egg in years.

Lisa Dolchok is the Elder Program Coordinator for the Southcentral Foundation, a nonprofit organization that runs outreach programs for Anchorage-area Natives.

DOLCHOK: "I know my culture. I understand what this felt like for them because this is new, to be able to do this in an urban city. It served two purposes. It helps control the growth of geese, plus it fulfills our traditional lifestyle. For our elders who are in the hospitals and nursing homes, to taste that again is worth it."

The egg hunt is Anchorage's latest attempt to curb its soaring population of Canada geese. In 1995, a flock of geese caused a U.S. Air Force AWACs radar plane to crash over the city, killing 24 servicemen. Ever since, officials have tried to reduce the number of geese that make their home on the lawns, city parks and ponds throughout the state's largest city. Rick Sinnott is a biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

SINNOTT: "Since the 1960s a nesting population of geese has established itself here in town. And it has gone from zero or very, very few birds that used to nest here to almost 5,000 birds this year. So it's been about a 13 percent increase annually over the past 25 years. And there's so much food here. They eat lawn grass primarily. There's so much food that we've predicted that within a decade we'll have four times as many geese."

To keep that from happening, city officials have tried just about everything to control goose numbers. In one effort, officials even turned domestic pigs loose to eat the eggs. But the population just keeps growing, says Sinnott.

SINNOTT: "They're kind of an increasing nuisance problem on lawns, just totally covered with feces and feathers and stuff like that."

Gathering goose eggs was a logical idea. Lisa Dolchok grew up in a remote village in western Alaska. As a kid she remembers collecting seagull eggs, since store-bought eggs were either too expensive or weren't available.

DOLCHOK: "We used them to make cakes and for all our baking because we didn't have chicken eggs because we'd run out of the eggs by springtime that came by boat in the fall. So we looked forward to egg picking. To me it tastes like an egg. I don't taste the difference in the goose or seagull or duck egg to the chicken egg. To me the only difference is size."

Not only are the eggs bigger, the parent geese are a lot bigger than the more timid domestic chicken. And, says Rick Sinnott, getting the eggs away from a large, protective parent goose isn't always easy.

SINNOTT: "At least some of the geese here in town have adapted to the urban environment and they're perfectly capable of scaring off a dog or cat or a small child by just standing over the eggs and whaling away with their wings. We've been struck by a few geese, but most have been content to jump off the nest and squawk at you from nearby. But some of them are very aggressive on the nest. They can be intimidating when they're hissing at you, and they can raise a welt if they get you with their knucklebone."

Scientists also are interested in the egg hunt. They're especially curious to know how the geese themselves react to having their eggs taken.

SINNOTT: "We're not sure what to expect. There's two theories. If you take all but one egg from the nest, the goose will keep incubating the one egg until it hatches. Then that one nestling will have more parental protection. The other school of thought is that there would be less survival because the nest had been disturbed and it might be abandoned by the parents."

Biologists and city officials say they don't want to eliminate Anchorage's goose population, just bring it under control. With the help of a spring egg hunt, they hope to cut goose numbers to just 2,000 birds by 2001.

OUTRO: For Arctic Science Journeys, this is Doug Schneider.