Snow geese and other migratory ducks, swans, and shorebirds have flown southward from the Arctic along the Pacific coast for thousands of years, since, according to fossil and archaeological evidence, Pleistocene ice sheets gave way to coastal wetlands. The birds were originally drawn to valley’s vast tidal marshes, using it as a rest stop on their journey. Few stayed for the winter; scant historical records suggest several thousand in all. Easier food and a warmer climate awaited them in California’s Central Valley. What’s more, much of the land around the Skagit River was forested at the time—not ideal territory for snow geese.

Settlers arrived in earnest in Skagit Valley around the time of the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliot, which took millions of acres in today’s Puget Sound region out of the control of Indigenous peoples. Prior to European settlement, the Skagit River and its southern twin, the Stillaguamish River, ran through thousands of acres of wetlands, according to Amanda Summers, a biologist working with the Stillaguamish Tribe. The settlers set about transforming the coast’s wetlands and forests into now-familiar fields of cabbage, oats, and seed plants for vegetables.

By the late 1960s, most of those coastal wetlands had been drained and replaced by flat, open farms. Lifelong Skagit farmer Maynard Axelson remembered when he was young seeing a small but faithful flock of snow geese return each fall to linger in the Skagit River’s delta. The geese seldom ventured inland. “It used to be a rare opportunity, shooting a snow goose,” said Axelson. “You had to go out on the marsh, so it was tough to get them.” Winter populations of snow geese hovered between a healthy 20,000 and 30,000 animals most years, with hundreds of thousands more flying south. Lesser snow geese weren’t endangered in the United States, though the population on Wrangel Island had been steadily dropping until about 1980.

Game duck populations needed a boost at the time, though, said Mark Petrie, a waterfowl researcher with Ducks Unlimited, a hunting conservation group. Their attempt to help ducks would set the stage for unprecedented snow goose success. In the early 1990s the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) partnered with Ducks Unlimited on a simple solution to help both ducks and farmers: plant cover crops. Cover crops such as clover and barley stabilize soil and add nutrients while providing migratory birds with something green to nibble on when they visit. The state also established nature preserves, including a 240-acre preserve across the road from Axelson’s farm. The preserves, the thinking went, would give migratory birds respite outside farmers’ fields.

“It was certainly aimed at ducks,” Petrie said of the program, “but with the knowledge that snow geese would use those fields as well,” said Petrie. “We fully expected that.”

The program seemed like a win-win.

About the same time, Skagit Valley saw another change. Vegetable canneries moved to eastern Washington, where operational costs were cheaper. In response, farmers in the valley, closer to the coast, shifted from growing canning crops—peas, carrots, corn—to potatoes. They’re not a natural food for snow geese, but they’re big and starchy, similar to the region’s long-gone marsh bulrushes. “Like a Snickers bar for a goose,” said Kyle Spragens, a WDFW waterfowl manager. The buffet table was set.

While the cover crop program eventually ended, the geese kept coming in droves, and they didn’t stay in the nature preserves. “Pretty soon, the geese were hopping over the dike and coming into the fields, going, ‘Wow, here’s food that’s available virtually 24/7. I don’t have to feed by the tide [or] by moonlight.’ That’s what really changed their habits dramatically,” said Axelson, the farmer.

The snow geese had learned that Skagit Valley was more than a rest stop. It was a destination.

“It was the perfect, or imperfect, storm, depending on who you ask,” said WDFW’s Spragens.

Before the year 2000, the number of snow geese wintering in Skagit Valley and the neighboring Fraser Valley in Canada bounced between about 20,000 and 50,000. After 2000, the winter population never dropped below 50,000. In most years since 2016, the winter population in the Skagit-Fraser Valleys has exceeded 100,000 geese. “If they have a good breeding year, with [populations comprising] 30 percent or more young, it could easily be over 170- or 180,000, maybe even 200,000 birds” that arrive in the area, said Sean Boyd, a wildlife biologist who has studied the Fraser-Skagit snow geese for three decades. It is unlikely the numbers will drop any time soon, said Boyd, barring an avian disease sweeping through the population. (Avian flu has already killed more than 700 Skagit waterfowl, including many snow geese, this year.)

The boom in snow geese here tracks with skyrocketing springtime populations at the geese’s Wrangel Island nesting site. This growth in the Arctic has meant many more snow geese also heading farther south over the past decade, to California’s Central Valley, where drought has increased competition with other waterfowl.

For photographers, birders, and hunters, the whirling flocks that arrive in the Skagit are a delight. Diana Hoffman got goosebumps as she recalled the first time she saw the geese here in the 1990s. “I was watching a quiet flock of snow geese blanketing a field,” said Hoffman, a photographer and board member of the Skagit Audubon Society. “When they lifted off, I cried, as I often still do. It’s just so beautiful.”

Farmers and scientists said they, too, appreciate the birds, but said the problems that 100,000-plus snow geese bring with them are real, and enormous. These geese are part of a system that humans have already whacked out of equilibrium, according to Summers, the biologist. “We lost the balance a long time ago, as far as the ecosystem and fish and wildlife go,” she said. “It’s a tricky species,” she said of the snow geese, “because they do tend to bottleneck in one area of the state, and that can make them hard to tolerate, depending on your perspective.”

When 100,000 geese move in for a season, they can bring a variety of problems. Poop is one of them. Snow geese poop about once every five minutes, said Spragens, the waterfowl manager. Farmer Jenn Smith knows this from experience. “You can’t go for a walk without an umbrella,” and not because of rain, said Smith, whose farm is on the same “goose hotspot” island as Axelson’s. Standing under the biggest flocks as they stream by overhead, you can hear a steady plop, plop, plop of poo hitting pavement.

That tension is underlain by forces a day-tripper may not notice. Development pressure has been building for years in Skagit Valley, which sits only about 70 miles north of booming Seattle. Some vocal locals are wary of growth; the valley prides itself on being part of one of the last “true agricultural economies” in Washington. In the 2021 survey, one respondent wrote about concern for a “loss of rural character.” Stickers proclaiming “Protect Skagit Farmland, Pavement is Forever” dot bumpers and road signs. This concern, and the preservation efforts it has spawned, have been successful: To date, more than 14,000 acres of the valley have been set aside as protected farmland. “Nobody is going to build on this farmland, ever,” proclaimed one farmer who recently brought 173 acres into the program. And yet pressures to develop never lessen.

At the same time, agritourism has become part of Skagit Valley’s brand, a place that is both food source and road-trip destination. There’s a massive tulip festival in spring and bustling roadside farm stands in summer. And so the visitors that the snow geese bring—birders armed with scopes, dogged photographers, hunters—can become stand-ins for larger issues about how the valley is changing, and they have prompted uncomfortable questions about what it wants to become. In this debate, visitors can be easy scapegoats for larger pressures that farmers feel, and expressing frustration toward them is a way to vent steam about a complicated situation, said Holmes.

At a time when Americans are increasingly polarized and reluctant to compromise, finding a path forward that can work for geese, farmers, and everyone else who loves this place is a double challenge