Canada Tells Artist to Ground His Geese

An Ontario artist who taught Canada geese to fly in formation with ultralight aircraft has found his wings clipped by the Canadian Wildlife Service.

Wildlife officials say that, if Bill Lishman does not sign an agreement to stop taking geese and other waterfowl up into the air lanes, they will confiscate his 18 geese. They gave him until Friday to sign.

“I’m prepared to let him keep his birds as long as he keeps them under wire,” said Joe Carreiro, the service’s chief of wildlife conservation and environmental quality. “If he lets them fly, he loses them.”

Lishman and a colleague, Canadian nature-lover Bill Carrick, were the subject of a story in The Times last May. After their success with geese, the two had hoped to use ultralight aircraft to teach rare trumpeter swans to migrate south for the winter, something trumpeters are believed to have done once but which they ceased doing after the arrival of Europeans and gunpowder in North America nearly wiped them out. The Wildlife Service has already confiscated a flock of hybrid swans that the men were keeping on a lake outside Toronto.

Carreiro said Lishman and Carrick had imported swan eggs from the United States without the proper papers. He said also that, by flying the geese from one place to another, Lishman might muddy the genes of the 35 known subvarieties of Canada geese in North America. In addition, Carreiro said that, because the geese were “imprinted” on Lishman and his ultralight, they would never lead normal lives.

“What is the future of these birds?” he asked. “They won’t even breed.”

Lishman said he did get egg import permits from Canada but had failed to get the corresponding egg export permits from the United States. He denied that by flying with the geese he was introducing them into new habitats. “They return with me, and I put them back in the cage each time,” he said. As for the question of breeding, he said some of his geese had flown south for the winter and returned with “their boyfriends.”

“The Canadian Wildlife Service’s nose is out of joint because they think we didn’t consult with them soon enough,” he said. “I think they just got jealous about the whole thing. We’re stealing their glory; that’s the way it seems to us.”

To avoid confiscation of his geese, Lishman said he plans to have moved the birds by Friday to an undisclosed marshland where the owner has a valid avicultural permit.