Fennville throws a festival for the geese — and means it

Most small towns name their festival after a fruit or a founder. Fennville named its big fall weekend after the geese, and it’s not a gimmick — the birds really do show up by the thousands. Each October the Fennville Goose Festival fills the streets with a parade, food, and a craft show, all of it timed to the autumn arrival of Canada geese that pour into the marshes and grain fields just outside town. The festival has run since the 1980s.

The reason the geese come down to a particular set of fields is itself a good story. A few miles from town sits the Fennville Farm Unit, about 4,100 acres of the Allegan State Game Area. Before the state owned it, the land belonged to the A.M. Todd Company of Kalamazoo, and they grew peppermint on it — Michigan was a serious mint state, and Todd was a serious mint company. The Department of Natural Resources bought the old mint farm in 1949 and turned it into a managed unit for waterfowl.

That’s what makes it goose country today. Wildlife managers plant crops and flood ground specifically to draw and feed migrating birds, and the result is a famous concentration of Canada geese each fall — enough to make the place a destination for hunters in season and for anyone who just wants to watch the sky fill up at dawn or dusk.

So when Fennville throws a party for the geese, it’s celebrating something concrete in the fields nearby: a worn-out peppermint farm that the state remade into one of the best spots in southern Michigan to see — or hunt — a flock of geese settling in for the season.