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September 27, 2009

I’ve gone to the past two public commentary meetings on Sauvie Island Wildlife Area’s proposed management plan. Both meetings took place at the Sauvie Island School. My presence at the first meeting, which took place on August 25, 2009, was primarily to address Mark Nebeker’s tactics in restricting public hunting opportunities (see: Rabbit Hunting on Sauvie Island: The Battle for Hunters’ Rights).



Just days prior to this meeting, Mr. Nebeker called Jerry Ray, an officer with Mary Peak’s Hound Club, because, according to Mr. Nebeker, he was taking the effort to reverse his change in the rules at the wildlife area and restore full-hunting rights on the island personally. In that conversation he told Mr. Ray—probably in an effort to forestall any organized opposition to the management plan—that he was working with Libby Wentz, another Mary Peak’s member, to come up with a plan to restore raccoon hunting on the island. Apparently this was news to Mrs. Wentz who said that Mr. Nebeker will barely acknowledge her presence in a room. So I found it telling that Mr. Nebeker will go on the record (as shown in the latter part of the above video) and claim he never said such a thing and that he continues to assert that small game hunting has never been allowed on the island no matter how many people have told him otherwise.

During the course of the meeting, I became increasingly concerned about the management plan as a whole. According to Mr. Nebeker, not only is he shutting down hunting for most small game, he is establishing a blanket policy which reduces access for hunters, wildlife viewers, hikers, and the general public. He is also proposing spending a lot of money to change habitat including everything from razing blackberry briars, which provide much needed cover for small game and birds, to converting existing hunting areas to crop land.

His rational for these measures seems to be centered around the Cackling Canada Goose and goose habitat in general.

So I asked, “What is the mandate for increasing the goose holding capacity of the wildlife area? Is that strictly out of the Oregon Conservation Strategy?”

He replied by saying “No,” and then proceeded to talk about research on ag land [sic] and food crops in the valley.

So I interrupted and said, “I’m sorry. I think maybe I did a poor job phrasing the question. What is the mandate for Sauvie Island to increase the goose holding capacity? Where is that coming from?”

He said, “It’s from the Pacific Flyway management plan.”

I said, “So help me here. Because, If I’m correct, and I am just reading off of the Pacific Flyway Council plan’s website:”


“So, I guess what I’m trying to find out is why is Sauvie Island’s wildlife area all of a sudden focusing entirely on goose populations when the Pacific Flyway Council [plan] isn’t a mandate to do so?”

He replied, “Because we follow the plans and recommendations pretty closely.”

It was my observation that nobody in the room was happy with this goose-oriented management plan. The duck hunters complained that the historically rich diversity of ducks has been chased out by the geese, and the farmers complain that the geese are destroying their crops and the habitat areas they try to establish for ducks.

I went away from this meeting with the self-assigned homework of researching the asserted justification for the Mr. Nebeker’s actions: the Pacific Flyway Council management plans.

Mr. Nebeker asserts that there are only 180,000 Cackling Canada Geese—well short of the 250,000 goals. The only reference I can find to 180,000 in relationship to cackling geese is a web page that posted a Register Guard article dated 1997:


So I thought I’d see what the Pacific Flyway Management Plan for Northwest Oregon / Southwest Washington (which hasn’t been updated since 1998!) stated in terms of goals:


Note that the population objectives are dead last in precedence! Furthermore, it states:


Even if the 180,000 number was correct, it would seem to more than meet the target index.

Not being satisfied with numbers that were 12 years old, I decided to see what Alaska’s department of wildlife had to say on the subject of goose numbers.

Alaska’s 2000 performance report Status, Trends, and Public Use of Migratory Game Birds in Alaska says:


The 2001 version states:


The 2002 version doesn’t even bother to mention a count.

The most recent numbers I could find were in the document Nest Population Size and Potential Production of Geese and Spectacled Eiders on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, Alaska, 2008. It states that, in 2008, the total number of nests for breading pairs of geese was 116,285. Because cackling geese are monogamous, that equates to 232,570 breeding geese. There were also 351,091 successful eggs.

That number alone might make it sound like the population has dropped, but you need to take into account what a breeding Cackling Canada Goose is. The break-downs of breeding geese by age are:

• One-year-olds: only occasionally
• Two-year-olds: 72%
• Three-year-olds: 73%
• Four-year-old and greater: 90%

That means that, effectively, 100% of one-year-old birds, 55% of two and three-year-old birds, and 10% of four-year-old and older birds are not accounted for using the nest counting technique.

When presented with the science, Mr. Nebeker didn’t even seem interested in getting the data sources to check them out to see if they were valid.


So if we don’t get the commission to reject Mr. Nebeker’s management plan, we are going to see a loss of habitat on the wildlife area for other species, reduced use for everyone regardless of activity, increased private-property depredation as more and more geese decide the winter on the island (does anybody really believe the geese are going to stop at the borders of the wildlife area?), and a loss of hunting opportunity as geese push other animals off of the island. Remember, all of this is being done, without any scientific basis, to bring back a population that is in fact already thriving.

November 5, 2009, is the last day we can provide written input to the commission. The last opportunity we have to address this plan is December 11, 2009, at the commission meeting in Salem. We need to make sure that the wildlife commission knows our objections before we lose the only public hunting area we have in the northern Willamette Valley and the Sauvie Island Wildlife Area turns into a goose reserve where humans need not request entrance.