The Canada Goose

Jenna Ashton

Described as invasive, a nuisance, and squatters by not only most mainstream media outlets but also by a number of wildlife charities, the much-maligned Canada Goose populations of the UK are important members of our more-than-human urban communities.

The Canada Goose is a legacy-animal of colonial extraction. Imported by the wealthy from North America in the 17th Century, the current goose populations of the first industrial city, Manchester “Cottonopolis”, live along the canals that once transported goods across the Pennines. Her body is a site of experience, watery archive, and historical witnessing across the intersections of colonialism, climate change, and gender oppressions (her ability to reproduce very effectively is deemed troublesome.)

Attitudes towards the Canada Goose can act as a yard stick for testing and expressing how the stresses of social and environmental injustice shape the functioning of inner-city communities. An “art of attentiveness” to the needs and interests of the honking, loitering goose may help us better connect to and explore that which is negated and deemed dispensable under conditions of raging inequalities. Specifically, the geographies of geese movement, expression, and agency within encounters and interactions with humans and other animals in the neighbourhoods in which they live offer a new strand of enquiry for the anthropocentric discipline of Heritage Studies; as well as for place-based heritage practice and policy-making, and ecological (re)thinking of organisations such as the Canal & River Trust that care for their habitat.

In 2019, the stray/free-roaming dogs in post-war Prishtina (Kosova) activated my attentiveness to the potential of a living landscape as a site of multispecies enquiry for rethinking processes of memorialisation and heritage-making in the city. This is also true for the Canada Goose. During my arts-practice research in neighbourhoods in North Manchester (UK) on community climate resilience (2020-23), I have been trying to make sense of what residential community actually is in a diverse and spatially and culturally complex post-industrial city area; how community functions, how it perceives itself, who even makes up community in people’s every day’s experiences and imaginations. The geese – and not one or two but pretty large families – should be considered part of these community explorations given they are permanent, prominent residents. They make their nests along the Rochdale Canal and regularly saunter across swathes of yet-to-be developed land, waddle up the side streets, casually passing by a corner newsagent. They are bold and a bit nosy, but pretty passive and not bothersome.

The body of a Canada Goose is the size of a medium dog and the neck can stretch to a good 5ft tall.  It’s perhaps understandable that these beautiful but imposing birds can inspire awe but also nervousness. The geese, really, are the most visible wild animals in these urban neighbourhoods. The remaining green spaces in the area are either ex-industrial so-called wastelands (under threat of development) or sites of demolished council housing that have already been earmarked for new private housing. The geese are so much part of the everyday environment that some residents clearly feel very protective of them, as they would their pet dog or cat. With other residents, the language is one of empathy and shame about any accidents, thefts or killings that take place, and a sense of trying to exert the rights of the Canada Goose to exist as any other local resident. Others describe them as “aggressive”, but their hissing and peck threats are launched only if you get too close to their babies in the summer.

I want to bottom out the complexity of the relationships between people and the flocks. Importantly, the geese are consistent witnesses to the changes and shifting landscapes around them. For example, it’s not only working class residents who are negatively impacted by housing development on their few green spaces, but the geese also become displaced as more and more of their home next to the canal is encroached upon.

Animal Geographies for Heritage Studies

Heritage studies is still evolving as a disciplinary area with varied methodologies, bringing together perspectives and approaches from sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, archaeology, geography, history, and the arts. Heritage Studies demands we think critically about heritage as a concept and performance, and its materialisation, how it pertains to identities, power, and ethics. Heritage is made by categorisations and value systems. Heritage studies concentrates upon the political dynamics of this contemporary and historical heritage-making, and who gets to shape decisions about what we express care for, and how values get attributed to spaces, things, people and processes.

Co-production and values-led practices are espoused by the more recent “turn” described as critical heritage studies. Critical heritage studies emerges officially as a disciplinary approach in the 2000s, inspired by earlier anti-colonial, black and indigenous, and feminist thinking. The Manifesto of the ACHS claims the discipline should challenge ‘nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, cultural elitism, Western triumphalism, social exclusion based on class and ethnicity, and the fetishising of expert knowledge’ (ACHS). Specifically, as stated by the Manifesto, ‘we argue that a truly critical heritage studies will ask many uncomfortable questions of traditional ways of thinking about and doing heritage, and that the interests of the marginalised and excluded will be brought to the forefront when posing these questions.’ The ACHS approach therefore demands a programme of research and practice engaging with diverse content and authorship and methodologies. It also encourages learning programmes driven by social and environmental justice concerns.

Heritage as a social practice, then, is to try and understand the social situatedness and complexity of perspectives, meanings and values attributed within our environments. Heritage as a social practice is generated, renewed and reproduced by people through space and time. The material world and its creative acts are both the remnants and the drivers of a continuous and fairly contentious cycle of narrative and storytelling which is continuously shifting, informed by desires and demands, visibility and invisibility, eradication or permanence, aesthetics and taste, oppression and subjugation. Although some people would like “heritage” to be a fixed selection and prescribed set of standards confirming certain ideals of national identity, in practice, it is always in flux, being shaped externally and internally.

For me, this is what makes heritage studies an exciting developing field.

So … animals. This is the missing part of Heritage Studies theory and practice for the aforementioned goals and approaches of the discipline. Animal geographies will necessarily complicate the narrative around value-systems. Not only for how animals are advocated for within environmental management, tourism, cultural expressions and practices, and so on, but also how animals themselves shape generate, renew, reproduced heritage practice and theory. Animal Geographies may help to evolve these methodologies for an expanded Heritage Studies that take seriously heritage as more-than-human.

Arts-practice research with the Canada Goose

Arts practice as research can focus on the gaps into which fall the stories of people and species that inhabit and love places differently with less glory, but with pride, creativity, quiet knowledge, and more goose poo. As an arts-practice researcher I want to take time to think through my methodology for working with the geese, the nearby residents, users of the canal, and the Canal and River Trust who are the primary organisation caring for geese environs in Manchester. Building on my previous work, I know that arts-practice research can enable the geographies and lives of the geese to be better understood and, perhaps, loved a little better than they are now.

What form(s) the practice takes, I am not sure yet. I keep returning to Mieke Bal’s work around image-thinking and artmaking as cultural analysis, which of course is in relation to the exploration of human cultures. What artmaking is relevant for analysis of goose cultures, especially beyond the stereotyping promulgated by the written word? If artmaking involves goose participants, what ethical issues need to be addressed? Importantly, will this artmaking as analysis (although useful for theoretical reconceptualization) actually help the welfare conditions of the Canada Goose populations in Manchester? Similar to the mantra of human-focused action research, do no harm, there is also a responsibility of do some good.

All photographs are copyright of the author.

Dr Jenna C. Ashton (Jenna.Ashton@manchester.ac.uk  // @heritagemcr)

Jenna Ashton is an artist, curator, producer, and Lecturer in Heritage Studies at the Institute for Cultural Practices, University of Manchester. She is also the Research Lead for Creative and Civic Futures and an Associate Member of the Sustainable Consumption Institute, UoM. Jenna’s arts-led interdisciplinary research explores community cultural practices, knowledge, creativity, and economies; multispecies living; storytelling “place”; feminism and inequalities. She is the editor of 2-volume collection “Feminism and Museums: Intervention, Disruption and Change” (2017/18). Upcoming book publications include “Feminist Co-production: As a Crochet Textile Playground” (2024), “Routledge International Handbook of Heritage and Gender” (2025), and “Urban Communities and Climate Justice: Insights from Arts-Practice Research” (2025).