We have worked with some school districts over the years. Geese get onto playing fields and playgrounds and create a mess. Geese can become combative if they are nesting nearby or are raising their young. The intersection between human and goose is not a problem if geese can stay away from areas in use by humans. But school grounds can have hundreds of kids playing on them and geese can create messy areas if not what I call “wall to wall poop.” Also, enough geese feeding long enough on fields and playgrounds can harm grass growth and cause big headaches for the grounds crews and the school’s budget.
There are two or three solutions to too many geese on a property. The most common are lethal, hunting or nonlethal, hazing or what is called chasing. I have not heard yet of hunting permitted on school grounds and to effectively chase geese can be time-consuming for schools crews and not too effective. We haze geese with a method I call herd-chase. I think working a Border Collie inside its natural and instinctual herding frame of mind helps the dog work naturally and healthily and productively.
Border Collies can be trained to herd farm animals, livestock, and then take that onto the goose control work. The difference is that livestock should be handled quietly and geese a bit more energetically. You should gently convince, say, sheep to walk from one field to another, not run them. With geese, you are trying to persuade them to stay away from a property by herd-chasing. But this should be done safely and without terrorizing the geese. What in fact is happening is that you are training the geese to think predators keep showing up where they want to feed.
Tara and Nash were my team at a school for a goose-control trip last week in New York State. It’s a school with a wetland behind it, so lots of geese appear at different times of year to feed on the school grounds. There were 100 or so geese on the large fields when we arrived at the school. Some of these were on the football field surrounded by a running track; others were on the huge athletic fields nearby. I sent Tara on an outrun to the right of where we were standing. An outrun is how Border Collies go out and bring sheep to their handlers by running wide and out to the other side. The geese saw Tara and started to get alarmed that something might be after them. I then sent Nash, our mix breed directly toward the geese. He is not good at out runs but knows this job well. At the sight of Nash coming on and Tara coming around the other side of them, the geese took to flight and away from the school. This time of year the geese have lots of farmers’ harvest fields to feed in.
Haze or chase or herd-chase geese off effectively several times over and they can be convinced to show up less or not at all on a property. Of course, this is only with the geese that you are working with, not other flocks of geese that have not been “trained.” What also happens is that if the geese are worked with effectively enough other people can have better luck convincing the geese to fly off. Also, geese, if they do appear on school fields or playgrounds, they will do so in less obtrusive areas of a school’s property.