Schagen is again busy trying to stop the growing population of greylag geese. The eggs are smeared with oil so that the embryos cannot develop. North Holland has about 14 to 19 thousand breeding pairs. They eat the grass off the cows and shit all over the place. Last year’s damage to nature and agriculture: about 10 million euros. “If we don’t treat the eggs, they will all hatch. It will continue like this, of course.”
The geese can hardly imagine a better laid table than in North Holland. Immense meadows with green, protein-rich grass. This also means that, among other things, the greylag goose can no longer be ignored in our landscape. The huge population causes a lot of nuisance, says ecologist Pluk Bakker of the municipality of Schagen. “They eat the grass that the farmers use for the cows to give milk. The geese also eat the reed collars, which are important for reed sawmillers.”
Injury
And to think that about forty years ago the greylag goose was still a rare breeding bird in the Netherlands. Bakker: “They were even released at the time and the population in the Oostvaardersplassen has been able to develop very much. Since then, also with the changing landscape, the population has increased so much that the damage to agriculture no longer acceptable is. Growth seems to be under control now, it is stagnating, but we would prefer to go back to the situation of 2005 when the damage was much less.”
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Lilian Wigarda of the municipality of Schagen walks along the reed beds on the north side of Schagen. She has brought a bottle of oil to smear or dip the eggs. “I have already treated this nest. There were seven eggs in it and as you can see one egg has hatched, so a successful action.” There are more nests further on. Geese take flight as Wigarda approaches. She treats all eggs except one. It may hatch, otherwise the geese will lay a new egg. “We have about sixty nests with an average of about six hundred eggs, so that’s quite a bit of birth control.”