>By MARY JO PATTERSON
FRANK DeBLASIO lifted his gaze from the turtle his young son had just plucked from the edge of Clark’s Pond in Bloomfield to the Canada geese floating on the water’s surface. Then he gestured toward the weird terrain underfoot: denuded earth, scattered with goose feces and feathers.
“It’s nice when there are a few geese, but this whole place is disgusting,” said Mr. DeBlasio, 52, an amateur nature photographer and frequent visitor to the pond, situated behind a middle school and playing fields. “The other day I counted 70.”
When you live in the New York metropolitan area, it’s easy to believe that there are too many geese, or that they hang out in the wrong places. Since the 1980s, geese have made such a spectacular comeback here that goose-control companies have become nearly as numerous as yoga studios. Two decades of eradication efforts by towns, golf courses, airports, public water authorities and others have succeeded in ridding specific sites of the birds. But wildlife biologists say the killings and relocations have barely made a dent, and “human-goose conflicts” still blanket the region.
In a few cases, they turn fatal. For the goose.
Last month a Princeton orthopedist with a summer home at the Jersey Shore was arrested on animal cruelty charges after the police said he killed a gosling with a rake. The orthopedist, Dr. Michael P. Coyle, 62, told the police in Mantoloking that he intended only to disperse the geese and used the rake in self-defense after being attacked by an adult goose.
This spring also produced reports of a goose in Stamford, Conn., walking around with an arrow through its body; of a former state senator accused of killing goslings in his barbecue grill in Jackson, Miss.; and of a golfer who charged a goose with his golf cart in Omaha, Neb.
Yet hundreds of people are using more peaceable means to combat geese, coating their eggs with corn oil to prevent embryos from developing. The strategy, aggressively promoted by a Virginia-based nonprofit group called GeesePeace, has become popular. For example, officials and volunteers this spring reported the oiling of more than 200 eggs in Greenwich, Conn.; 94 in parks in Morris County; and 85 in Ridgewood.
In Huntington, on the North Shore of Long Island, officials have also decided egg oiling is the way to go. The town has counterattacked with border collies, noisemakers, fake wolves and a hawk kite flown five feet above a golf cart, but geese remain a nuisance.
“Next year, we’ll try to oil eggs,” said Donald McKay, director of the Huntington Parks and Recreation Department.
Many people admire Canada geese. They are intelligent, tough-minded, monogamous, family-oriented and not easily fooled. The downside is their droppings — a pound or more a day, per bird.
“They are just machines at passing grass through their systems,” said Bryan L. Swift, waterfowl specialist with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. The state has about a quarter-million resident geese, with the highest densities in the lower Hudson Valley and on Long Island. Though their waste is not considered a public health threat, “one hundred geese depositing fecal matter on lawns and sidewalks is an aesthetic nightmare,” he said.
Mr. Swift once studied a goose program in Rockland County to determine where the resident geese went after being chased by dogs. The answer was athletic fields within a couple of miles’ flight.
“When geese are pushed out of one community with a good budget for goose control, they might end up in a community that can’t bear the brunt of the cost,” he said.
Keeping geese on the move is expensive. It costs Larchmont $700 a week year-round, according to Mayor Elizabeth N. Feld.
The birds’ overabundance is not their fault. Migratory Canada geese nest in subarctic Canada and fly south each October, but resident geese have not gone anywhere in years. They are descendants of Canada geese whose wings were clipped in the early 1900s by hunters using them as decoys, and of geese farmed by state wildlife agencies that stocked rural areas with them during the 1950s. Since then the region has suburbanized and developed perfect geese habitat: open stretches of fertilized and manicured grass, near water.
“We have beautiful lawns, and we keep cutting them; every time we do, it’s like a new spring salad for them,” said Denise Savageau, director of the Conservation Commission in Greenwich, Conn.
Like hundreds of other bird species, Canada geese are protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1916. But in 2006, citing booming numbers of geese and widespread damage to property and natural resources, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service eased the rules. It also allowed states to extend goose hunting seasons. Permits for egg oiling, once a complicated business, can now be obtained online.
Few towns kill live geese, and fewer still admit it. In 2006, only 7,700 of the 1.3 million Canada geese residing within the Atlantic Flyway, from Maine to Florida, were killed, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.
In Bloomfield, Steve Jenkins, athletic director for the schools, deplores the mess by Clark’s Pond. “I have no moral compunction with someone killing them,” he said. “It’s equivalent in our opinion to rats scurrying around on the field.” But others are unlikely to agree with him, Mr. Jenkins said.
One of the few jurisdictions that owned up to killing geese is the Union County Department of Parks and Community Renewal. The county originally had geese quietly gassed, but officials faced protests after The Star-Ledger in Newark reported the fact in 2003.
This year the county will use a contractor who captures the birds and transports them live to a poultry processor supplying a food bank, said Daniel J. Bernier, director of the Division of Park Planning and Maintenance. July is the time for roundups; the geese molt and lose their flying feathers, making them easy targets.
David Feld, the founder of GeesePeace, started wondering what to do about geese while president of his homeowners association in Lake Barcroft, Va. A dispute over the neighborhood’s goose problem was tearing the association apart: Some homeowners wanted the geese killed; others did not.
Mr. Feld, an engineer, developed a multistep “recipe” for eliminating nuisance geese through egg oiling, followed by various measures to keep them at bay. Oiling is considered humane because it is applied only to eggs in early stages of development. The method keeps air from passing through the shell, preventing the embryo from developing.
“The geese aren’t here by choice; they’re trapped,” Mr. Feld said. “We help them break the cycle so they can leave.” Adults without goslings will fly to Canada to molt and not return until early fall. “What you’ve done is freed the spring and summer and part of the fall of goose issues,” he said.
GeesePeace trains volunteers, who treat eggs in receptive communities.
One volunteer is Jim Borghoff, 46, of Ridgewood. Mr. Borghoff, a jogger, his wife, Doreen, and their two children had all encountered goose waste in Ridgewood’s parks. Last year he trained as a GeesePeace volunteer and braved brush, thorns and poison ivy to search for nests along the Saddle River.
“Finding the nests was surprisingly easy,” he said. “The next part was kind of terrifying. Some of the geese are more aggressive than others and harder to get off the nests. You walk very slowly at them with an open umbrella. They hiss and flap their wings, but ultimately they hop off.”
This April Mr. Borghoff went on the hunt again, detailing his activities in a lively blog (nopoop07450.blogspot.com). He also began working on a plan, which would include a volunteer dog patrol, for dispersing geese on school property.
Sometimes, all it takes to win the goose war is a fresh approach.
In 1998 Jim Strauch was a stay-at-home dad with an infant daughter in Allendale. He enjoyed taking the baby to the borough park, which has a lake, but found himself stepping over mounds of goose droppings. Overhead, a loudspeaker blared bird calls from known goose predators.
“It was funny for the first few minutes, but then it became a form of torture,” he said. It was also ineffective.
Mr. Strauch, 48, sought permission to have his dog, a female shepherd-greyhound mix, try herding the geese away. She succeeded. Soon other residents volunteered their dogs, and the Allendale Volunteer Goose Patrol was born. Today it has nearly 20 volunteers, including Mr. Strauch, now a councilman. His original dog is no longer alive, but two new dogs succeeded her.
Other times, people are just lucky in the fight against geese. Or blessed.
In 2006, the Queen of the Rosary convent in Amityville had a terrible goose problem. Their droppings ruined the fish pond, devastated the vegetable garden and slimed the walkways. The convent carpenter made 16 plywood wolf cutouts and set them out on the grounds. The geese took off at first sight and never returned, Sister Margaret Briody said.
“We have been blessed with having them leave without our having to hurt them in any way,” she said recently. “The fellows fixed them on a spring, so they bounce a little and turn in the wind. They also move them around periodically.”
