Geese Touch Down for Their Winter Visit

They come to the San Fernando Valley for the same reason people originally did--warm weather and bountiful agricultural land.

They create such a raucous noise overhead that they’ve earned the nickname “honkers” and travel in such dense flocks that they are considered a flight hazard for aircraft at Van Nuys Airport.

Canada geese descend upon the Valley and other areas of Southern California every winter, their long, black-and-white necks outstretched in V-shaped flight formations of military precision.

The geese are back by the hundreds this winter--although experts say only about half as many arrived as in the recent past--preserving a touch of wilderness in an increasingly urban area.

Several flocks regularly arrive in late autumn to spend the winter in the Valley, shuttling between reservoirs, the flood plain behind Sepulveda Dam and the shrinking acreage of farm fields, where they scavenge for grain and grasses.

A Dec. 15 bird count in the Valley by the Audubon Society determined that there were 1,400 of the waterfowl, a number that experts say is down from the usual 3,000 because the region’s lingering drought has reduced the amount of available forage.

Many of the geese spend their winter days on the sprawling fields surrounding Pierce College in Woodland Hills, where the birds are so plentiful that Ted Kinchloe has integrated them into his bird identification class as a “natural living laboratory.”

They regularly fly over the house of Doris Bradshaw of Tarzana, who runs out to count them whenever she hears the approaching din of the flock. She estimated that 1,000 geese swooped over her roof years ago on their way to the nearby Sepulveda Dam.

“You wouldn’t believe it,” she said. “It’s a very primitive, earthy sound. . . . As we’re struggling on with our problems of environmental pollution, these geese remind me that the environment will go on.”

The big birds--occasionally weighing more than 20 pounds--are not a happy sight to some pilots.

Although collisions are rare because the geese fly below the altitudes most aircraft cruise at, “if one gets in the engine of a big plane it can knock the engine out,” said Clay Lacy, who operates a jet charter service at Van Nuys Airport.

The waterfowl are a picturesque sight at the city Department of Water and Power’s Chatsworth Dam, where civil engineer Marty Adams once saw a flock so vast that “the bottom of the reservoir was nearly blanketed.”

Adams participated in a tour of the 1,320-acre Chatsworth Dam area last weekend, sponsored by the Chatsworth Reservoir Conservancy, a local environmental group.

The tour drew 50 nature lovers and Adams said there were only about twice as many geese. He estimated that there were “dozens instead of hundreds or thousands,” as is in previous years.