Geese can be trouble; how to deal with them?

WHEN YOU MENTION Canada geese to someone, you’ll usually get one of two reactions: People either love them or hate them.

    We haven’t always had the huge numbers of geese we do now. In the early 1940s, the Canada goose was nearing extinction due to overhunting. Sound familiar? Remember the buffalo? Hunting is the best wildlife management tool we have, but if it gets out of hand, the wildlife numbers will suffer.

    It wasn’t until the early ’50s that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) began to trap and distribute the geese to states that wanted them. This began as an accident. President Dwight D. Eisenhower was playing golf and stepped in goose dung while wearing his white golf shoes. He asked one of his aids what could be done about this. After a few meetings, the trapping and moving began. The rest is history.

    There are basically three problems with the Canada goose: The defecation, their feeding habits, and their attitude. The good things are that they are pretty, and it’s nice to see them flying over in a V and honking. I watch them from my office window flying over the Monongahela River.

    Anyone who plays golf or swims in a lake that has geese living there knows the amount of defecation there is. It’s horrible. Contrary to what some people think, goose dung does not spread any disease that the experts have been able to find. A former director of the Wildlife Research Center Water Fowl Disease USFWS said, “On occasion, we have been wading in that stuff and dead birds up to our elbows and there is not a single documented case of us coming down with any kind of disease problem. We do not have a human health situation in the urban geese, the wild geese, nor the captive geese that we have worked with.”

    On the other hand, there are those who say that when captive geese are force-fed and slaughtered for their livers, the pate de foie gras made from the liver can cause Creutzfeldt-Jakob Syndrome, or mad cow disease, in humans.

    Goose poop in lakes is a large contributing factor to algal blooms and excessive plant growth. One goose will add a half pound of phosphorous to a lake every year.

Geese will clip off new grass right down to the root. They love a newly planted field of oats, wheat or rye. When they move in by the hundreds, the crop will suffer.

    Geese may look pretty, but they can be mean. They’ll hiss and charge you if you invade their territory.

    Three ways you can get rid of geese are using a repellant, scaring them, or capturing and euthanizing them.

    I only know of one repellant you can use: Methyl anthranilate. It’s found in Concord grapes and is used to flavor grape chewing gum, but geese hate the taste and won’t eat anything treated with it. It’s available in spray form.

    Chasing or scaring them can be entertaining both for you and a dog. Border collies or any other herding dog will do. Geese don’t like to be herded and will leave. If you would not mind another type of bird around, get a pair or two of swans. A few geese will stay, but most will leave. Plastic swans will also work.

    Killing the geese is often very controversial with the public. Capture and euthanasia will get rid of the geese for a while, but more will take their place. This method can be expensive. It’s usually done in the early summer, when the birds molt or lose their flight feathers. They are rounded up and then asphyxiated. Where laws and public sentiment will permit, the geese can be hunted.