This scene on the Crescent City bluffs is noteworthy for two reasons. One is the presence of the geese themselves—close to extinction for decades, but now recovered to a population some 40,000 strong. The other is that hundreds of locals and out-of-towners now gather to celebrate the geese’s survival, in a gritty town where environmentalists are as popular as hangovers.

The “dawn fly-off,” as it’s billed, is the centerpiece of the Aleutian Goose Festival, an annual fête now in its fourth year. Conceived as a marriage of ecological celebration and economic development, the three-day event is the brainchild of nature photographer Rick Hiser and economic development pro Sandy Jerabek.

“My husband and our friends used to sit out on the bluffs after work with wine, cheese, and bread to watch the geese fly back to the rock,” Jerabek recalls. “Then we thought, ‘we should share this.’” The festival now attracts a few hundred people each year, so far from 13 states as well as some international visitors, including many hard-core birders and other nature enthusiasts. Originally funded by a U.S. Forest Service grant, the festival now operates on registration fees and local sponsorships, notably from the Tolowa Indians’ Smith River Rancheria.

The participants come for more than just the geese. Organizers assemble a menu of trips and workshops, 65 this year, on topics ranging from the habits of owls to local geology. A birding excursion this year to Del Norte County’s varied habitats encountered 96 avian species in a single day. On another trip, two Tolowa elders gave a riveting tour of village sites their people used to inhabit. And for kids, Mother Goose herself makes an appearance.

The festival is demonstrating that visitors will come to the area for nature-based tourism if the town rolls out a welcome mat and offers interesting activities. “It’s an invitation to people to be part of the transition from resource extraction to resource celebration,” says county supervisor Martha McClure. Festival-goers spend at least $70,000 in the area each year, Hiser estimates, during a lean time two months before the beginning of peak tourist season. Savvy organizers equip participants with cards to leave behind at area restaurants and motels, letting proprietors know that goose-gazers have patronized their establishments.

Many residents have embraced the festival, not just as a source of visitor dollars, but in spirit. Schoolchildren from kindergarten to high school enter goose poetry and poster contests. The town bakery turns out goose cookies, and about fifty locals show up for a dawn “community fly-off” a week or so before the festival, with refreshments provided by a nearby reform school. “For people here, the geese used to just be ‘the birds,’” Hiser says. “Now they think of them as ‘our birds.’”

Some have mixed feelings about the geese, which the festival organizers—to their credit—are quick to acknowledge. Three dozen geese are said to eat as much grass as one cow, burdening local ranchers with the equivalent of as many as a thousand extra head for several crucial weeks when their grass is just sprouting. The geese’s appetite forces cattlemen to buy more hay for their herds, at a cost estimated at upwards of $60,000 a year, and to expend considerable energy driving them off fields reserved for cattle. A solution is now being crafted that would compensate ranchers for the loss of forage, and dedicate some public and private land to the geese.

Like other California wildlife festivals, the Aleutian Goose Festival helps locals and outsiders alike to appreciate the unique qualities of the place and its species. Back on the cliffs near Point St. George, sandwiched between rainclouds and the steel-gray ocean, the morning’s last wave of geese flies by in ragged V’s. To the east, redwood-covered mountains come into view with the rising light behind the coastal cypress. The geese have worked their magic once again, entrancing observers with their beauty, their constancy, and their rebound from near-oblivion. “Thank you,” says one of the participants on the shuttle back to festival headquarters. “Don’t thank me, thank the geese,” Hiser replies.

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North Coast writer Seth Zuckerman writes often for Ecotrusts’s daily news service, Tidepool.org.