SNOW GOOSE, PART 1: How one species has become its 
own worst enemy ... details ahead on Passport to Texas
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Passport to Texas from Texas Parks and Wildlife and the 
Sport Fish and Wildlife Restoration Program

Maintaining a healthy wildlife population involves 
balancing the number of animals against their habitat's 
ability to sustain them.

For the last ten, fifteen years, you've seen snow goose 
populations just really climb. The numbers have gone beyond 
anything anybody could have ever anticipated. [:07.5]

Dave Morrison is the waterfowl program leader. He says 
colonies of snow geese have grown so large that they 
have become their own worst enemy.

And in the breeding areas you're starting to see those colonies 
grow to such an extent that they're eating themselves out of 
house and home. [05.9]

Morrison says the birds have overgrazed their breeding 
grounds in Canada.

It's not only the grazing that they do -- It's also the grubbing. 
Actually getting underneath the soil and pulling the root system 
up. And so when they do that you get these vast expanses of 
mud flats. And the growing season in the arctic is so short, that 
is may be a lifetime before a lot of these areas can recover [:20].

Tomorrow, we'll tell you about the Snow Goose Conservation 
order.

That's our show ... made possible today by the Sport Fish 
and Wildlife Restoration Program ... working to increase 
fishing, hunting, shooting and boating opportunities in 
Texas. 

For Texas Parks and Wildlife ... I'm Cecilia Nasti.