Goose explosion leaves taxpayers to clean it up

THE NEXT TIME you’re trying to clean up the Canada geese’s fried-egg size droppings from your yard or dodge them at a public park or golf course (no, those aren’t golden eggs these geese left behind), thank your state government.

When your cats and dogs and kids are terrorized by an aggressive batch of hissing, charging feathered intruders, or when you’re startled awake at dawn by the awful racket of a suddenly excited, loitering flock, thank your state government.

The oversupply of Canada geese that the state is forced to spend public funds to clean up after, that private parties are forced to spend their own money to clean up after or, more controversially, have “removed,” that is pitting neighbor against neighbor over said removal processes was created — at public expense — by what was then the state Wildlife Department.

Think of the geese as kudzu.

Granted, the comparison isn’t perfect. The federal government imported kudzu to save cropland from erosion, whereas our state went up north to round up 7,000 Canada geese and “translocate” them to South Carolina for purely recreational purposes.

But in both cases, unintended consequences arose when man decided to tamper with the ecosystem.

Twenty-five years after state wildlife officials overrode the Canada geese’s decision to stop migrating to South Carolina, the transplanted geese have spread like — well, like kudzu. This has triggered not only pollution problems and occasional crop damage but nasty confrontations between neighbors over how to deal with the birds some consider a blessing and others a curse: Some want them left alone, others want them humanely relocated, and still others — who have had the upper hand of late — want the federal government to round them up for slaughter.

State Natural Resources Director John Frampton, who was part of the original translocation project, says South Carolina would have wound up with an overpopulation of Canada geese no matter what, because officials in North Carolina and Georgia were doing the same thing. This, of course, begs the question: Why did we even bother spending public money on this project?

Mr. Frampton notes that the project was funded with hunting license fees and other money generated by “sportsmen’s activities.” But even if you think that makes any difference (we don’t; there’s no legal distinction between such fees and tax dollars), this whole matter still points to a much larger problem that still plagues South Carolina a quarter century later.

The goose project was designed to serve the interests of hunters, whom wildlife officials have long seen as their constituency, and they defend their decision to this day. But environmental scientists at DHEC might well have made a different decision, one that was more respectful of the notion that fooling with Mother Nature is at best a risky proposition.

Unfortunately, our government is composed largely of autonomous islands that often don’t even communicate, much less agree upon a course of action that serves the entire state rather than any island’s own narrow constituency. There’s no larger power — say, the governor — to make a call when they disagree. So DHEC uses whatever power it has to do what it thinks best, Natural Resources uses whatever power it has to do what it thinks best, and so on throughout much of the government. As for the rest of us: We pay the bills.