Seasons change and so does our interaction with wild life. As human development of land continues, wild life, geese included have to adapt. Humans change ,or don’t the way we think about bears coming to our bird feeders or wild geese defecating on beeches and play grounds and deer eating vast amounts of farm crops. Weather your making your living raising food for people to eat or you just want to feed song birds you might have a different perspective from some one who does not. Thing is, we all gotta eat, I personally don’t want my food coming from a factory. But this is more about how we keep golf courses from being overrun by wild goose poop and 6th grade soccer players safe from protective daddy geese who raise their young next to that soccer field.
Right now, things are changing. The weather is indeed changing, you may have noticed. This impacts wild life to the point of behavior pattern changes. Early last winter the geese didn’t leave! Why? because it was unusually warm in December. We got called back by a number of clients after we had suspended service for the winter. In some cases clients had hundreds of geese which had gathered to “migrate” and did not until after Christmas. I even was told that one community lake which when it finally did freeze over, that geese got frozen to the surface. In all my years doing this, that is a first. Changing weather patterns, weather extremes play a role in other changes to geese behavior, which I can talk about another time.
The Pandemic I think played a role in what we are dealing with with wild goose control. No matter where we go with our Border Collies in the states we operate in, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut the fluctuation in people being not around at all to being ever present I am sure has effected geese in parks and other public places. How could it not! Wild Canadian Geese are very adaptive to humans but that doesn’t mean they like being around us. I will leave it there and let you come to your own conclusions.
I will end with a short story from a goose control visit last spring. A community park we work is surrounded on all sides by town roads and then homes. It is a quiet enough place but there is still traffic going slowly, people mowing lawns and walking dogs and pushing babies and kids playing basketball in the small parks as well as people fishing. The geese can poop up the parks quickly, pollute the lake if their numbers get high, denude peoples lawns confront people and so on. Its our job to keep the number of geese down by herding the geese with our Border Collies to train the geese to stay away or stay out of the peoples way.
One day last spring geese were just about to enter the lake from a small park. I was kayaking with our seven year old Border Collie, Blade in front of my seat. I told Blade to jump out swim the little way to shore and then move in on the right of the geese while I paddled to the left. This maneuver usually sets the geese to fly off. Just then a man and a women show up with bags of bread. They start feeding the geese. I tell Blade to stop, he does. The geese are near a road and in the road and cars have to stop and people walking and walking dogs are not shore where to go to safely get by. The drivers are not sure what to do as well. Meanwhile the couple keep feeding the thirty odd geese flinging white procced bread all over the road and road side. I call Blade back to the kayak and I give up for that day.
While differing attitudes toward wild life and pets for that matter are nothing new. I think the heated stance that we see some folk take is new. There are so many factors that play upon all aspects of how we live that simple solutions may be counterproductive. Wild goose control, a non lethal and a traditional solution at its core, is one tool to help us reduce conflict with wild geese in a changing world.