- [Anna] Coming up on "Great Lakes Now."

Are there too many Canada geese?

- I don't think that there are many people out there that have an undying love for the Canada goose.

- [Anna] The crucial role and surprising behavior of freshwater mussels.

- Freshwater mussels are an integral part of our riverine ecosystem.

They're kind of the rivers of the river - [Anna] And a new history of the fur trade.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] This program was brought to you by the Fred and Barbara Erb Family Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Richard C. Devereaux Foundation for Energy and Environmental Programs at Detroit PBS, Polk Family Fund, DTE Foundation, and contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

(ambient music) - Hi, I'm Anna Sysling.

Welcome to "Great Lakes Now."

When we do stories on wildlife, it's often about a beloved critter that's threatened in some way or an invasive species that's multiplying and taking over ecosystems.

Not this next story though.

(upbeat music) If you've been outside in North America lately, then it's likely that you run into Branta canadensis, the Canada goose.

But wait, are they Canada geese or Canadian geese?

- The answer to that question is Canada geese.

They do not hold passports and they, you know what?

They ignore international borders, but we refer to them as Canada goose.

- [Anna] That's Matthew Olewski, executive director of the Jack Miner Migratory Bird Sanctuary in Kingsville, Ontario.

He's team Canada goose.

And what about Jack Miner?

You can probably guess how he felt.

- Jack Miner loved the Canada goose for its unconditional devotion to its family and to its mate.

And so, you know, it's really neat during nesting season to see that species sacrifice so much for its young and for its loved ones and for its flock.

So there is that beauty of nature that can be observed if you take a second of your day to notice it.

And it is not absent from my mind that Canada geese can certainly come with their own complexities, especially when we're talking about urban populations.

- Not everybody loves Canada Geese the way that Jack Miner did.

- I don't think that there are many people out there that have an undying love for the Canada goose - [Anna] Across the border in Michigan, the state is changing the way it deals with nuisance geese.

Relocation is out.

Guess what's in?

Jared Duquette is a human and wildlife interaction specialist with the Michigan DNR's Wildlife Division.

- Not only do you have lots of geese, but like you have that additive feces kind of mess, right?

It's gross.

- [Anna] Barbara Avers is a Michigan DNR waterfowl and wetland specialist.

- Most of our urban areas in the state, I'd say that they're experiencing some sort of Canada goose conflicts.

- Some of the challenges we see with managing Canada geese, probably the biggest one is just how many are out there.

- [Anna] There are about 281,000 geese in Michigan today.

That's far more than the target population of 225,000.

And the US Geological Survey says Canada geese are probably more abundant now than at any time in history.

- [Barbara] And when you have these larger goose populations locally in relation to the same place where you have larger human populations, that's where the conflicts occur.

- [Anna] The problem is that humans and geese tend to like the same kinds of places like lawns and waterfront parks and golf courses.

People and geese get together in those places and they don't always get along.

- A lot of people come with, you know, really poor experiences of engaging with the Canada goose.

(upbeat music) - [Anna] One big issue, goose poop.

Canada geese poop about every 12 minutes and that adds up to a pound or two of poop every day from every bird.

Those droppings can contain e-coli bacteria, which can make people sick or wash into the water and lead to beach closures.

And anyone who's ever been menaced by an angry goose in a parking lot knows that they can be downright aggressive.

Maybe you've seen the videos on social media or even on the news.

- [Announcer] A goose on the attack.

The goose caught on camera and catching a student off guard - [Announcer] Look closely as the student tries defending himself only to get accosted a second time.

- You kind of see this exclusion kind of behavior going on and not only with amongst themselves, but with people.

And that's where we get those conflicts sometimes.

- [Barbara] The aggression sometimes during that breeding season, that can be one of the conflicts that people have is just if a goose nest near a building let's say, right near a business or something and you know, people are trying to get in and out or an apartment building, those geese can be pretty aggressive and kind of attack people.

Of course, we also have farmers.

Geese can come in, especially when crops are just emerging and you know, geese can be eating those.

Of course, airport safety is another big one.

- [Announcer] A commercial aircraft, a US Airways flight from New York to Charlotte lands in the Hudson River in New York City.

And amazingly, all the passengers got out alive.

Tonight- - You might remember Flight 1549, it made an emergency landing in the Hudson River in 2009.

Well, according to the National Transportation Safety Board's accident report that happened after both of the plane's engines ingested at least two Canada geese weighing about eight pounds each.

The report also says, quote, "Canada geese are particularly hazardous to aviation because of their large size, flocking behavior, attraction to grazing sites at airports, and the year-round presence of their resident populations.

But in a way, we have only ourselves to blame.

Over the years, we've made North America into a pretty appealing place for geese."

- [Matthew] Maybe we would have a bit more patience for them.

If we understood that the reason that they're flocking to cities and hanging out beside us while we're trying to, you know, enjoy a moment with our family picnicking in the grass, if we understood that they're there because geese love fresh cut grass, it's like candy to them.

- [Anna] The spaces we've created, lawns, parks, golf courses, airports, they're basically goose paradise.

So now what do we do?

(bright music) - Like a lot of things, I'm a big believer in preventative medicine and I think that's the same thing in wildlife conservation a lot is we do have some tools out there where we try to prevent these things like feces from kind of adding up in areas that people wanna be.

I've been working with a few very urban municipalities here in Michigan.

One municipality, they have a park that gets about 60,000 visitors a year, so pretty intensive, but they have lots of geese there and they're like, "What can we do at this little site?"

And so we're actually partnering right now to test like an autonomic laser that works.

We program it to work on various locations and it just runs itself off of solar power and geese hate lasers.

So it's kind of cool, innovative way to do this and we're seeing pretty good success at that little site.

- [Anna] If there are no lasers handy, specially trained dogs can also drive geese away from a specific area.

But these days, there is a good reason to avoid moving geese around.

(ambient music) - Keep in mind that everyone is still dealing with and managing the avian flu epidemic.

- [Anna] Avian flu or bird flu is a virus that usually spreads among birds, but the highly pathogenic H5N1 subtype of the virus has infected not only birds, but also dairy cows, other mammals, and humans.

Millions of chickens have been called to control outbreaks.

An expert's worry that a mutation could allow the virus to spread between humans and cause a pandemic.

Overpopulation of Canada geese increases that risk as they can spread the virus to other animals.

And that's why Michigan changed its policy from relocation to euthanasia.

- It's a real threat to our domestic poultry industry.

And also now we do have highly pathogenic avian influenza in some of our dairy herds.

We don't want to be potentially increasing the risk of the spread of that virus by moving birds around the state, which means that birds that are rounded up do have to be killed.

We're hoping many people will choose to try to get them processed and get the meat distributed to charitable organizations.

And I do wanna mention why that's a big change and I wanna make sure we talk about why that change is happening and really that relocation has just become unsustainable.

- [Anna] With relocation off the table and no natural predators to control the population, it falls to us humans to do it ourselves.

- Hunting is that tool that we need.

And without that tool, we would have even more birds on the landscape, more conflicts to deal with.

And so it really is, that's another part of it too, is just understanding that rule of hunting and how important it is to the management of our wildlife resources.

- Hunters are some of the greatest conservationists out there, some of the strongest advocates for habitat and wildlife conservation and restoration.

And the act of hunting waterfowl and recovering bands and sharing that information with the scientific community is incredibly important.

And it informs policy that is tied to migratory birds.

(ambient music) - Rivers around the Great Lakes region are being cleaned up and restored, but what happens to the creatures who call the river home once that work begins?

- [Announcer] River restoration projects typically include removing or adding material to the river bottom, and that creates a problem.

Native freshwater mussels live on the river bottom and if the river is going to recover, the mussels need to survive the restoration process.

The solution is to bring in a team of specialized divers to find and remove the mussels before the bulldozers arrive.

(ambient music) That's where people like Ryan Schwegman come in.

He's the COO of consulting firm BioSurvey Group.

- I've done this work all over the Eastern United States, so just this year, I've been in the Adirondacks in New York, Mississippi River in Iowa, in Ohio.

Now, here we are in Michigan.

We pretty much travel all over the place to do this.

- [Announcer] BioSurvey Group is based in Ohio, but in September of 2024, Ryan's team was in Grand Rapids, Michigan, searching for endangered snuffbox mussels in the Grand River.

- [Ryan] We specialize in doing endangered species work and surveys for those.

So we also do other services besides freshwater mussels.

- [Announcer] The divers were able to systematically search 40,000 square meters of the Grand River by following a series of lines secured to the river bottom.

- Each one of the transects are marked on the upstream and downstream side with a GPS unit.

They're about 10 centimeters plus or minus accuracy, so they're pretty accurate and we pin those out there, and then pull the line straight and connect to those.

So all they gotta do is follow the line.

They have a two meter wide by one meter tall grid and that's divided into two one by one cells.

So they go out, they look at that one by one cell, they're fanning the substrates, and looking for fresh water mussels.

They look over that area multiple times and then they'll flip that over and repeat the process.

- [Announcer] Leah Dann was one of the scientific divers searching for mussels in the Grand River.

- You can kind of sometimes just see them poking a little bit up out of the substrate and then we'll start moving rocks and stuff and wafting the sand and silt and stuff and just try and get about six inches deep.

If we find some, we usually do another scan just to make sure we haven't missed anything.

So we'll just keep scanning until we've had a really thorough look and haven't been finding anymore.

- [Ryan] They all carry a little bag with them and they put the mussel in the bag.

When that transect is done, they take all the data and that goes over to our species specialist, our malacologist, who will ID all those and record what individuals we found on each transect.

- [Announcer] Heidi Dunn is a founding member of the Freshwater Mollusk Conservation Society and the lead mussel expert on the Grand River project.

- I got introduced to freshwater mussels in 1978 when I was an intern with the Fish and Wildlife Service.

And then from there, I started working at another consulting company and pretty soon, I just became a specialist.

- [Announcer] After identifying each mussel species, Heidi uses a grinding wheel to mark the shells.

The shallow groove serve two purposes.

- When we go back to monitor these animals that we have moved, we wanna be able to identify the animals that we've relocated as opposed to those that were already there.

We grind it to the edge, the the ventral edge of the animal.

Any shell material that's laid past that is growth.

So then we know they're feeding and they're growing and they should be happy.

The federal endangered species are also pit tagging.

It's a passive integrated transponder tag, which then we can wave a wand over the substrate and find those animals.

- [Announcer] The dive crew was able to complete the Grand River job in just three weeks.

- Normally, you know, you'd have a crew, which might consist of three or four divers.

We're here, we've had over 20 people in the water almost the entire time.

And with the low, low water conditions, we were able to snorkel more than we had to dive, which is always a lot more efficient.

- [Announcer] The conditions are not always so favorable.

In some rivers like the Mississippi, the water is so murky, the divers use touch rather than sight to find the mussels.

- In comparison to doing Mississippi where it's maybe fast zero vis, you know, very equipment intensive, this is definitely on the more enjoyable side of the things we do.

When you're looking for mussels in zero vis, it just becomes a skillset that you acquire over time.

You feel the density differences, the shapes.

It's hard to kind of imagine if you've never done it, but eventually, it just becomes kind of second nature.

- Zero vis stuff.

I mean, there's some fun about that too, like relying on the tactile.

But yeah, it's definitely nice when it's crystal clear.

- A lot of the zero vis stuff, they actually excavate everything in the cell and they put it in a bag and then it gets sorted on the surface.

- [Announcer] The dive work can be physically demanding.

- Sometimes we just have hard days where it's really cold or there's so much current that like the other day I was wearing 70 pounds to try and stay down.

(chuckles) We're usually in the water by 8:30 and then we usually try and finish up in the water around 4:30, around eight, eight and a half in the river, and then sort of 10 to 11 hour days total - [Announcer] Hours of immersion, even in freshwater rivers create issues for the divers.

- You get cuts that don't heal and weird rashes and ear infections and we're always putting in swimmer's ear.

The rashes are a bit of a pain, but yeah, we're all very good about keeping any wounds clean.

- [Announcer] So why take the risks and go to all this effort just for a few mussels?

- Because freshwater mussels are an integral part of our riverine ecosystem.

They're kind of the livers of the river.

They sit in the bottom of the river.

At one time, there was 50 to 100 per square meter.

- [Announcer] There aren't that many mussels anymore.

One of the reason?

Mother of pearl buttons, which are actually made from the lustrous inner shell of freshwater mussels.

The abundant mussels in North American rivers led to a mother of pearl button industry boom.

From 1890 to 1940.

A single factory on the Mississippi River produced a staggering 1.5 billion buttons in 1905 alone.

This over harvesting decimated mussel populations and soon river systems began to break down.

- They cleaned up the rivers for us.

They took the nutrients out of the water column and put it down into the substrate where it was available for invertebrates, which are fish food.

It also stabilized the substrate and made substrate for invertebrates to colonize, and then that attracts fish.

And of course, then that completes the lifecycle.

- [Announcer] Native fish and native mussels depend on one another.

The mussels help ensure a food supply for the fish and the fish help the mussels reproduce and spread.

Although the fish don't exactly volunteer, so the fresh water mussel have developed a clever way to trick the fish into helping them.

- The thing that's special about them is they all require a fish host to complete their lifecycle, and they all evolved in freshwater systems - [Announcer] To attract their desired fish, the mussels use their fleshing mantles to create tempting lures.

Snuffbox mussels try to attract log perch.

- They have little flaps that they flap around to attract the log perch.

So the log perch comes in to see what's happening, and she closes her shells on his nose and holds them in place and then pumps their glochidia or larvae into his gills.

But then his friends come over too and they get a few glochidia on them, and so it populates a whole bunch of fish.

Then the fish encapsulates them and they ride around on the fish for a few weeks and they drop off hopefully in good habitat.

Those log perch can move between mussel beds, et cetera, so that, you know, distributes the gene pool.

- [Announcer] Fresh water mussels play such an important role in maintaining healthy river systems that saving them is a key component of mini river restoration projects.

- I'm in the water or processing mussels for eight to 12 hours a day and loving it.

And it feels good to be doing something that matters.

You know, I think it's really important that what we're doing help ecosystem.

- If you have a good mussels population down there, you have a functioning river system.

(ambient music) - Carl Gawboy is a Minnesota artist and Ojibwe scholar who grew up in Ely, north of Duluth and near the Canadian border.

He's both Finnish and Bois Forte Anishinaabe, and his art reflects those traditions in Minnesota history.

In the spring of 2024, he published "Fur Trade Nation: An Ojibwe's Graphic History," which draws on his personal and family experience, his research as a cultural historian, the work of contemporary indigenous scholars and artists.

And with more than 800 illustrations, Gawboy's prolific artistic talents.

Our friends at the Center for Global Environmental Education at Hamlin University sent us this story.

- I suppose the first idea for the book came when I was growing up in Ely because all of my friends were trappers or else they wanted to be trappers.

And trapping was something that adolescent boys did in Ely, but there's a kind of a gap.

Nobody knew anything about the fur trade when I was growing up.

That was never talked about.

Even Indians never talked about it.

Even though on any Indian reservation in Minnesota, there is a fur trade site.

Leech Lake has several.

Red Lake has about four.

The famous ones at Grand Portage, of course, but we didn't know any of that.

Nobody ever talked about it.

Education in this state was hand in hand with the Americanization program.

(ambient music) The fur trade has too much Indian in it.

And so when curriculum was developed in Minnesota, it started with Alexander Ramsey making the treaties with Indians who promptly disappeared.

So it gave people the idea that there was nothing here 'til they came along.

(gentle music) (upbeat music) Well, first of all, Indians used furs.

And in my book, I tried to show how some of these uses are done today in powwow outfits and so on.

Roche headdresses, buckskin dresses.

The use of animal products in Indian country today is pretty impressive.

It's still there.

So when you figure the fur trade, you had to start with Indians trading with each other.

As the fur burning animals in Europe became extinct because of intensive trapping, fur hats became very fashionable, happened right about the same time that the colonists were being established on the eastern seaboard and the British had come to Canada and the French had come to Canada and they suddenly put everything together and they saw North America as filled with game animals.

And so everyone thought that this would be a way to make a hell of a lot of money.

The Indians, on the other hand, saw something that the Europeans had that was real vital to their culture and that was, wait for it, the cooking pot.

Now, I made a big point of this in the book because with the cooking pot, the Ojibwe were able to not only feed themselves more efficiently, but they were also able to feed the fur trade personnel as well.

They could produce surplus of their food products.

We should call it the cooking pot trade rather than the fur trade because it was just as important on our end of the deal.

(lighthearted music) Anybody who knows Indians knows that they had a very terrible 20th century.

And I thought, "I have to acknowledge that somehow."

So I said that the people who had trade routes connecting oceans were forbidden to leave the reservation without a permit.

Say, it's worse than saying, "Okay, you guys, you gotta live here and you can't leave without a permit."

But they were people who could get in the canoe and go to the Pacific if they chose.

People who invented the canoe were removed from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area.

That's very ironic that that should happen.

Oh, and then just being left out of history, left out of first rate history certainly, then left out of any history of people here before.

But see, if a person were to write a history of the the Iron Range and then leave out the miners, that's like writing a book about Minnesota history and leaving out the Indians.

(lighthearted music) (ambient music) - Thanks for watching.

For more about our region's history or any of the stories in this show, visit greatlakesnow.org.

When you get there, you can follow us on social media or subscribe to our newsletter to get updates about our work.

See you out on the lakes.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] This program was brought to you by the Fred and Barbara Erb Family Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Richard C. Devereaux Foundation for Energy and Environmental Programs at Detroit PBS, Polk Family Fund, DTE Foundation, and contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

(ambient music)