Tigers, lions and a gorilla named Guy. There was much to hold a schoolboy spellbound in the London Zoo. The schoolboy’s focus, though, was firmly on a curious goose, grey in feather with a striking green patch of bare skin on its beak.
The label attached to the wire of the wildfowl aviary revealed the goose had a place in the zoo collection just as important as the bigger, more dramatic bird and animal exhibits representing the wide world of nature.
The goose from a far-away place called Tasmania was headed towards extinction and those on display were part of a captive-breeding program which would one day see them returned to their wind-swept, remote island homes in the Bass Strait.
Also in the aviary was another threatened species of goose, Hawaii’s nene.
The Cape Barren goose in the mid-1950s – at the time of my school visit – were indeed vanishing from sight. Although these birds had lived in harmony with the Aboriginal people of the Bass Strait island for millennia, they could not escape the slaughter conducted by the European sealers who arrived in the early 1800s. Whie hunting the seals, they killed the Cape Barren geese for food.
Such was the scale of the initial slaughter, the goose population plummeted in number. It was not until the mid-20th century that the extent of the demise of the species was fully realised. An urgent conservation program was needed, to save the species facing the same fate as the Tasmanian tiger which had vanished from view just two decades previously.
My initial encounter with the captive goose came to mind when Birdlife Tasmania’s newsletter announced a special presentation on the goose would be the subject of th group’s next meeting.
As a schoolboy in crooked cap, baggy shorts and socks dragging around my ankles, I could never have imaged that one day I would live in Tasmania myself, and become an active supporter of the goose on its home turf.
Years and miles apart, I have seen the goose in the wild and not in a zoo enclosure. My first sighting of a small flock on the Tasman Peninsula confirmed what I had seen in 1956. This is a beguiling species that belongs in the wilds of Tasmania and not in a zoo, and, worse, as a stuffed specimen in a zoo like the thylacine.
There was good news during the Birdlife Tasmania presentation by Cape Barren goose expert Robbie Gaffney of National Resources and Management, Tasmania.
Thanks to a stringent management program that took into account the concerns of farmers – the geese competed with livestock for food – and met the expectations of the hunting community the geese had been saved.
Since the dark days of the 1950s, the goose population has not only stabilised, but increased. It now stands at around 24,000 birds, centred mainly on Flinders Island.