Here in the North East, the busy time is Spring. It seems like nonstop work for our goose control service with Border Collies. The geese tend to disappear with the cold and snow of winter. But they also are more scarce in Summer. The molt is the reason. The molt is when adult geese shed and regrow their flight feathers. They are and feel more vulnerable during this time, mid-June to mid-July. So, the wild geese find safe places to be for that month.
If you do not want geese about you best be doing something about their presence in The Spring. There has been an effort to not go that route and leave them alone except for egg adding, but I have found that mostly to be a bad tactic. Golf courses that make their money, including municipal courses that rely on the revenue, want very few if any wild geese present. Schools do not want hundreds of geese on playfields and playgrounds. Farmers do not want geese pooping in water buckets for the farm animals or horses and eating crops.
Different tactics can be used to keep wild geese from being a problem for landowners including business and Home Owner Associations. Barriers can be put up, like bushes and or fences. Lasers can be used and predator decoys. And of course, there are lethal means as well. Border Collies and other herding breeds are used and actually only should be used by trained handlers. In the hands of a knowledgeable handler, a Border Collie can convince quite successfully wild geese to graze somewhere else. We use a technique that is a modified form of herding. Our dogs are regularly trained with sheep and poultry herding. We do not want any mistakes in the field.
By NO “mistakes” I mean that we do not create unsafe situations for the wild geese, the dogs, ourselves or other humans, and other wildlife during our “visits”. Border Collies and perhaps other herding breeds have the drive and instincts for this work, the geese can not get away from the fact that they think a wild predator is about. Border Collies are incredibly disciplined and in the right hands create a partnership that creates a team that gets the job done smoothly. Shepards with their collies, as they were called historically, have worked with ewes, female sheep, and their lambs for 1000s of years, successfully. Our goose control “visits” are patterned after the herding tradition that shepherds have always employed in minding their flocks. Goose control visits may include working with families of geese when the goslings are young.”Baby geese” grow up very fast and soon resemble adults. A family of geese or families of geese will quickly impact “the environment” they are in if it is not an expansive watery wetland, lake, or pond.
I have been thinking of our goose control service, at its best, as a way to renaturalize wild geese. Wild geese once did not have lawns and fairways and playfields to graze. Wild geese lived on aquatic vegetation and did very little interacting with humans. that has changed, as we have changed and as we have changed things. From time to time on a lake or wetlands we work, I see geese at least now part of the time “dabbling”, eating aquatic vegetation. This includes young and “baby” geese, quietly, peacefully grazing the water shallows as they float along. Keeping the interaction with humans to a minimum so conflict is reduced. What else should we want for?