Magpie geese cause Australian grower to lose 13,000 trays of mangoes
Peter Manolis from Kelso, on the edge of Townsville, said he had seen magpie geese in the area before, but he had never witnessed such destruction as he did during his 2016/17 harvest.
"We have thousands of magpie geese come in around October and in the last couple of years they're now starting to eat mangoes," he said
"Three years ago we found them knocking the odd piece of fruit to the ground and then pecking it, but in the last two years we now see them landing in the trees, which is something we'd never seen before, and just indiscriminately pecking fruit. This season we found a variety of birds pecking the fruit, even crows."
Dr Hamish Campbell, a senior research fellow with Charles Darwin University, said it was feasible the geese that had found a taste for mangoes in Queensland have flown from the Northern Territory.
"That's totally possible, for sure," he said.
"Some of the birds that we've tagged have been flying 600 kilometres so it's perfectly reasonable that those birds could be flying from the Northern Territory."
source: abc.net.au
