Well hidden in my camouflaged ground blind, I listened as Curt Wilson skillfully conversed with several hundred Aleutian Canada geese circling above our decoy spread. Curt’s high pitched greeting calls and double clucks had the geese talking to themselves and the eight-dozen full body decoys which had been artfully deployed in a winter oat field on a cold, January morning.

A second elliptical circle had allowed the flock to position themselves downwind of the decoys. Evidently convinced that all was safe and secure within the green browse, the leading echelon cupped their wings and started the familiar parachute to terra firma.

“Let ‘em land, let ‘em land!” whispered Curt, knowing that such an action would pull the entire flock of geese into eye-popping, can’t miss range.

The fact that we, and other California waterfowlers, would even think to be hunting Aleutian geese is a major tribute to the endangered species programs and North American waterfowl management strategies and regulatory oversight.

The Aleutian goose, one of the smallest subspecies of Canadas, weighing just four to five pounds, was formally abundant throughout Alaska’s Aleutian Island chain, plus several eastern Asian islands. No historic population size was known, but early explorers described their numbers as abundant. Almost nothing was known about their annual migration patterns and wintering destinations.

The Aleutians’ problem began when arctic and red foxes were released on their breeding grounds by Russian fur trappers in the 1700s. This practice was accelerated by American fur farms in the early 1900s, with foxes being stocked on virtually all of the Aleutian Island chain. The foxes quickly decimated the geese, which had no natural defenses against the land based predators on the previously mammal-free islands.

Preparing to land.

By the late 1930s the fur farming industry had collapsed and the fox populations (and goose predation levels) soared. By the 1950s, sightings of the Aleutian goose were rare, with some experts feeling the diminutive goose had become extinct.

As the first official refuge manager of the Aleutian Islands National Wildlife Refuge (originally established in 1903), Bob “Sea Otter” Jones and a dedicated crew began a 10 year task of removing the introduced foxes from Amchitka Island in the 1950s. His hope was that some Aleutians were still alive somewhere and could eventually repopulate Amchitka. During their fox removal work, a few geese were actually seen, but were evidently migrating further westward.

In 1962, Jones found a small remnant Aleutian goose population nesting on Buldir Island. This island, due to its distance from neighboring islands, its steep and rugged terrain, plus the lack of a safe anchorage, had never been stocked with foxes.

Brief History
By 1967, the Aleutian goose was unofficially declared an endangered species. Formal listing occurred following congressional passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973. After this formal listing, efforts were intensified to learn more about habits, migration routes and wintering areas of this rare goose. Trapping and banding efforts were begun and band recoveries from the 1974/75 hunting season established that the Aleutians (approximately 800) wintered in northern and central California, primarily on private grazing and farmlands in the northern San Joaquin River valley (approximately 75 miles east of San Francisco). A smaller group of geese, which nested on Semidi Island, was found to be wintering near Pacific City, Oregon (approximately 70 miles west, south-west of Portland).