From favored visitors to vermin

That's something I didn't know. I thought Canadian Geese simply stopped migrating owing to an abundance of overwinter food. Apparently that's not quite the whole story. From Anatomy of a Miracle by William Langewiesche.

Canada geese used to have a better reputation. They were visitors from the distant north who graced New York each fall and spring, igniting people’s imaginations and providing essential connections to the vastness of the continent beyond the city. When they passed overhead in their majestic formations they seemed destined for faraway places. In the early 1960s, however, the situation began to change, after state wildlife agencies came up with a bioengineering scheme whose purpose in part was to enhance state revenues by stimulating the purchase of bird-hunting licenses. The agencies captured breeding pairs of an endangered but supersize subspecies known as the giant Canada goose, and by clipping their wings forced them to settle permanently into authorized nesting grounds along the Eastern Seaboard and elsewhere in the United States. The offspring of these clipped-wing geese imprinted to the new locations, and, having lost the collective memory of migration, became full-time resident populations. Simultaneously, it seems, other Canada geese may have given up on migration simply in response to changes in farming techniques, which left a new abundance of corn on the ground in the Midwest and the Middle Atlantic states. Then came Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the banning of certain pesticides and chemicals harmful to birds, the imposition of environmental-protection laws, and the associated gentrification of former farmlands in places such as Long Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut. The newly non-migratory giant Canada geese settled comfortably into a paradise with few predators, where hunting was frowned upon, where food was abundant, and where there were plenty of golf courses, corporate lawns, and protected wetlands to dominate. Nationwide their population grew from about 200,000 in 1970 to four million today. In New York they now vastly outnumber their migratory cousins. They are magnificent birds in flight, partly because of their size—with wingspans up to six feet. But they are also insatiable overgrazers and prodigious defecators—territorial and overprotective of their young, traits they share with many of their human neighbors. So, in a shift of public emotion, they are no longer seen as honored visitors but as vermin and pests.