Month: March 2019

I strongly feel that the “job” of goose control should be done well. That means taking care of the dogs, geese, clients and anyone else who happens to be around. By “taking care” I mean the interest, health, and safety of all involved be considered. And lastly, the job at hand be performed well. And this all calls for skill formed and informed by practice, knowledgable study and lessons, and experience.

Talking about skill acquisition is all very easy to say and may seem like overkill, but harm has been caused by lack of skill. Dogs have gotten into trouble doing goose control, even drowned and geese have been hurt, needlessly, over frightened and the work to little effect. There is also a franchise out there that sells a fancy package to clients and sells its product to prospective franchise owners. I am told that these franchise owners are not supported with adequate training at all, so these poor people wind up not being able to function as goose control contractors. People spend a lot of time and money to no good result, and the poor Border Collies are ill-used.

I am not saying that everyone who uses dogs, preferably herding dogs like Border Collies needs skills that take years to acquire, but I am suggesting some time to gain knowledge of geese and these working dogs. When I was a young man, running an educational farm and got my first Border Collie, it took me a while to realize what I did not know about these intelligent but also very active and highly driven dogs. I usually tell people, please do not wait as long as I did to take lessons. Do it right from the start!

Of course, being professional means also skill and a good attitude with people too. The way we act, how reliable we are as well as having adequate skills with Border Collies and understanding geese and other wildlife are all part of the package of being professional. Having a plan at how to integrate your efforts with other means of keeping geese away will only help matters.

I took our two-year-old Border Collie Tara and eight-year-old Borer Collie Skye out on this year’s first goose control visits, recently. They had a great time. They were not exactly listening to me on our first stop. This was a school with big wide fields. Oh, they did their job effectively enough, running toward the geese when asked, just enough to make the geese fly quickly away. However, they did not take their flank “commands”, which set which direction I want them to go. It was all the excitement of the long Winter being over. With the third flock on the third field being herd-chased off, Tara and Skye were still doing a great job and were now taking my commands with no problem.

Even experienced goose control dogs like Tara and Skys need refreshers, even though we practice our herding skills at home with sheep and poultry. Our second visit that morning involved a client with a lake surrounded by roads and small parks. Geese were on the Lake, near shore, so we had to be careful about any cars on the roads. Tara and Skye were careful to listen, staying off the roads and stopping and coming back to me when I asked during the job. No matter how many of these goose control trips I do, I never take anything for granted. My description of professionalism may seem like stern stuff, but once you have it down, the reward of working properly with Border Collies out in nature is as rewarding as it gets.

In parts #1 to #3 I covered how to train and work with the Border Collies. Without knowing what you are doing with these dogs, all the effort will come to little but aggravation and a lot of wasted time and money. It is essential to do the leg work, the homework with Border Collies. Get experienced advice and take lessons and get the right direction.

As we move into this years goose control season, I realize I put more and more importance in coordination. I think that the clients we have that coordinate with us to a good end, get better results. We also now have prospective clients who are considering and one arranged group of clients that are putting multiple adjacent properties together in a “goose control plan”. I can not tell you how much this excites me. Geese don’t recognize property lines of course. So, getting neighbors to work together should produce even better results with goose control.

We do actually limit the presence of geese on the neighbor’s properties of our clients. It takes effort and knowledge to convince geese on say, a lawn way over there, that they should leave, without our Border Collies stepping foot on that property, but it can happen. Of course, goose control with Border Collies should be done with safety in mind. Parking lots, roads, bodies of water, fishermen, walkers, walkers with dogs, kids on bikes, baby carriages and on and on, these are all variables to take into account when chasing, or as I say, herd-chasing geese, when a job is first proposed it is good to ask a client about factors that will need to be worked around.

Property owners with nuisance geese populations may have tried, or you may have tried, different ways to keep geese off. And if you are considering the several different ways to do this, ask around on effectiveness. The internet is full of suggestions like natural barriers and fencing, spraying the grass, dog and coyote decoys and shooting blanks, as well as hunting and involving the US Fish and Wildlife to round up the geese during the molt. Some of these methods are effective, some only partly or work for a limited time frame. Of course, there is egg addling, for the nests, done with a legal government permit, this I recommend.

It is always a good idea to know what time of day the geese seem to most frequent a property. Very often the answer to this question is, “all the time.” But that will change with good herd-chasing and adjusting to changing behavior is important. Very often geese will show up when a property is quiet when not too many people about. Visiting with the dogs,  at dawn and or dusk, often shows good results.

We have clients who chase the geese they have when we are not active on their properties on our “off days”. We usually arrange to visit on a three days a week schedule. This schedule keeps costs down and usually is effective to get geese to greatly limit their presence on a property. Results can happen quicker with the clients personal helping. But, a big but, their efforts need to be convincing to the geese. There is nothing more damaging to goose control efforts than an effort that the geese do not respect. Effective goose control, of course, takes coordination.

Another important step to take with goose control is informing employees or residents of the effort. In some cases, there is a push back against goose control. Explaining the need and the process often is better than trying to go under the radar. Informing people in newsletters and a little effort to communicate one on one by the clients “managers” or personal and our handlers usually goes a long way to turning the tide of any negative views. There are those folk who think the only way is to blast the geese out of the sky. And there are those who think the geese should be left totally alone. But then, when a school playing field or playground ends up with fifty to hundred geese or more and the poop is “wall to wall,” and aggressive male geese start up in Spring, something has to be done.