In this talk, I will discuss how climate change is expected to impact the start of the growing season and the timing of goose migration in coastal western Alaska. I will present results from a 3-year manipulative experiment, where we changed the timing of the growing season and the timing of goose arrival to see how vegetation dynamics, forage quality and C and N cycling are influenced by these variables. Our results suggest that the timing of arrival and subsequent grazing by geese is the most important factor in this system. Early goose arrival reduced above- and belowground biomass, increased forage quality, increase N availability in soil, and increase overall greenhouse gas emissions. Geese seem to have gotten the clue - they are arriving earlier every year, even though they are not quite keeping up with the start of the growing season. While this might be good from a goose's perspective, from an overall greenhouse gas emission perspective, the outlook is more grim. With phenological mismatches developing globally, we argue, we can no longer just look at the how consumer populations are affected. We also have to take an ecosystem approach to understanding the long-term consequences of changes in timing.