Feathered family stuck on a rooftop gets a fairytale ending
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A family of seven recently overstayed their welcome at a swanky, boutique hotel in Atlanta's trendy Old Fourth Ward neighborhood.
They didn't have a reservation — but that wasn't the problem.
This was a gaggle of Canada geese, nesting on the hotel's rooftop garden patio. Mom and dad had been on the rooftop for awhile, but their five goslings — who were too young to fly — had no way to follow their parents down to a nearby pond, four stories below.
Michael Waters, a longtime volunteer with AWARE Wildlife Center, came to the rescue. Even as an experienced wildlife rescuer, Waters said saving the geese was tricky due to their behavior and strong gusts of wind.
'There were five little goslings, and they were all running in a fright,' Waters said. 'The mother and father goose were both present and they both were sort of in their guardian mode and were being very protective.'
The goal of the rescue, Waters said, was to collect the entire family to keep them together and relocate them to a pond below.
'The first thing I thought was to collect the little ones because I was just so concerned about them at the precarity of the ledge,' he said.
After Waters collected the goslings in a box, he tried to capture the father goose.
'He fought me off of his wing and flew off the building,' Waters said. 'He flew all the way down to the ground and was just honking like a little horror at the base of the building.'
Next, Waters tried to save the mother goose, but he realized she was also trying to escape. To prevent her from leaving, Waters released all the goslings, and she came after him trying to protect her babies.
'I was able to secure her in her enclosure, then I was able to collect all the babies again,' Waters said.
With the goslings and the mother goose captured, Waters took them outside to release them in the pond.
'Who was waiting there at the pond but the father goose!' Waters said. 'So, it was just perfect.'
While the rooftop goslings had never been on the ground or in water before, Waters said they adjusted quickly.
'It was so lovely to see their little instincts step forward,' he said. 'They immediately became amphibious and just waddled out and went out with mom and dad, and they all went to go live their wild lives.'
But how did the geese get themselves into this situation? Why would they want to nest on a hotel rooftop?
Kara Nitschke, migratory and game bird biologist with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, said Canada geese are very adaptable and easily assimilate.
'In urban and suburban areas, we keep our grass short like golf courses, parks, neighborhoods,' Nitschke said. 'Geese like that because they can walk through that easily.'
And she said it's a 'bonus' for the geese if these green spaces have a nearby pond.
'They can run to the water and hop in (if they feel threatened), and they feel perfectly safe and comfy,' she said.
The state of Georgia is home to about 250,000 Canada geese, according to Nitschke. Being a migratory species, the birds would make their yearly trip south from Canada. But in the 1970s and '80s when migration slowed, Nitschke said the state stocked the environment with around 8,000 geese — and since then, the population has boomed.
Canada geese are federally protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. That means if someone comes across an injured or orphaned goose or wants to relocate a goose, that person would need a permit to handle it, Nitschke said.
If anyone finds a goose or any wildlife that might need help, Nitschke and Waters recommend they call their state wildlife department or a local wildlife rehabilitation center, like Atlanta's AWARE, before interacting with the animal.
For Waters, who regularly works with and rescues animals, idealism keeps him motivated to continue his work.
'In any way that we can ameliorate or make better the effects that have consequences for these other beings,' Waters said, 'I want to be someone who gives at least the effort for things to be made better.'
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Jan Beutel was half-watching a live stream of Kleines Nesthorn, a mountain peak in the Swiss Alps, when he realized its cacophony of creaks and rumbles was getting louder. He dropped his work, turned up the sound and found himself unable to look away. 'The whole screen exploded,' he said. Beutel, a computer engineer specializing in mountain monitoring, had just witnessed a glacier collapse. On May 28, an avalanche of millions of tons of ice and rock barreled down the slope, burying Blatten, a centuries-old village nestled in the valley below. Local authorities had already evacuated the village after parts of the mountain had crumbled onto the glacier; a 64-year old man believed to have stayed remains missing. But no one expected an event of this magnitude. Successive rock avalanches onto the glacier increased the pressure on the ice, causing it to melt faster and the glacier to accelerate, eventually destabilizing it and pushing it from its bed. The collapse was sudden, violent and catastrophic. 'This one just left no moment to catch a breath,' Beutel said. The underlying causes will take time to unravel. A collapse of this magnitude would have been set in motion by geological factors going back decades at least, said Matthias Huss, a glaciologist at the Swiss university ETH Zürich. But it's 'likely climate change is involved,' he said, as warming temperatures melt the ice that holds mountains together. It's a problem affecting mountains across the planet. People have long been fascinated with mountains for their dramatic beauty. Some make their homes beneath them — around 1 billion live in mountain communities — others are drawn by adventure, the challenge of conquering peaks. These majestic landscapes have always been dangerous, but as the world warms, they are becoming much more unpredictable and much deadlier. 'We do not fully understand the hazard at the moment, nor how the dangers are changing with climate change,' said David Petley, an Earth scientist at the University of Hull in England. Snowy and icy mountains are inherently sensitive to climate change. Very high mountains are etched with fractures filled with ice — called permafrost — which glues them together. As the permafrost thaws, mountains can become destabilized. 'We are seeing more large rock slope collapses in many mountains as a result,' Petley told CNN. Glaciers are also melting at a terrifyingly rapid rate, especially in regions such as the Alps and the Andes, which face the possibility of a glacier-free future. As these rivers of ancient ice disappear, they expose mountain faces, causing more rocks to fall. There have been several big collapses in the Alps in recent years as ice melts and permafrost thaws. In July 2022, about 64,000 tons of water, rock and ice broke off from the Marmolada Glacier in northern Italy after unusually hot weather caused massive melting. The subsequent ice avalanche killed 11 people hiking a popular trail. In 2023, the peak of Fluchthorn, a mountain on the border between Switzerland and Austria, collapsed as permafrost thawed, sending more than 100,000 cubic meters of rock into the valley below. 'This really seems to be something new. There seems to be a trend in such big events in high mountain areas,' Huss said. Melting glaciers can also form lakes, which can become so full that they burst their banks, sending water and debris cascading down mountainsides. In 2023, a permafrost landslide caused a large glacial lake in Sikkim, India, to break its banks, causing a catastrophic deluge that killed at least 55 people. Last year, a glacial lake outburst caused destructive flooding in Juneau, Alaska — a now regular occurrence for the city. 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Scientists do have tools to monitor mountains and warn communities. 'There are fantastic instruments that can predict quite accurately when a rock mass (or) ice mass is going to come down,' Huss said. The difficulty is knowing where to look when a landscape is constantly changing in unpredictable ways. 'This is what climate change actually does… there are more new and previously unrecognized situations,' Huss said. These are particularly hard to deal with in developing countries, which don't have the resources for extensive monitoring. Scientists say the only way to reduce the impact of the climate crisis on mountains is to bring down global temperatures, but some changes are already locked in. 'Even if we manage to stabilize the climate right now, (glaciers) will continue to retreat significantly,' Huss said. Almost 40% of the world's glaciers are already doomed, according to a new study. 'We could have maybe avoided most of (the negative impacts) if we had acted 50 years ago and brought down CO2 emissions. But we failed,' Huss added. The consequences are hitting as the numbers of people living in and visiting mountains increases. 'We're just more exposed than we used to be,' he said. Ludovic Ravanel, an Alpine climber and geomorphologist who focuses on mountains' response to global warming, has a front line view of the increasing dangers of these landscapes. Mountains are the 'most convincing' hotspots of climate change, he told CNN. When he's focused on the science, he keeps his emotions at arm's length. But as a father, and a mountaineer, it hits him. 'I see just how critical the situation is. And even then, we're only at the very beginning.'
