Though migratory Canada geese are protected by the Migratory Bird Act of 1918, Canada geese that don‘t fly south for the winter are fair game for population reduction.

To manage a Canada goose, you need to know your way around a bird with strong wings, a hard beak, a sharp spur on each webbed foot and a willingness to use them to keep you at bay.

"You can't handle them unless you know what you're doing,'' said Craig Lewis, a Danbury man whose business is clearing wild animals out of homes and yards. "They can bite you.''

Last week, Lewis and Mark Jones, a fellow Danbury wildlife operator who works for Amtech, worked with the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection banding Canada geese.

The banding program helps the DEP monitor the movements of the state's flock of resident Canada geese — now about 35,000 birds strong. If the DEP staffers find a previously banded bird, they can check their records to learn a bit of the bird's history — where it was first caught, its growth rate, its age.

But the exercise also let the DEP study Lewis and Jones, to make sure they knew how to herd the molting birds, how to safely pick them up and handle them.

Danbury nuisance wildlife control operators, Craig Lewis, left, and Mark Jones, work with the state DEP to band Canada geese in southern Fairfield County. The geese are corraled while they are molting and unable to fly.

By year's end, the DEP will allow private nuisance wildlife operators like Lewis and Jones to provide a full range of goose management to cities, homeowner associations and land trusts, including removing the geese entirely and having them killed.

In part this is because a 2004 state law recognizes that white-tailed deer and resident Canada geese present special problems.

It's also because resident Canada geese — the birds that live in an area year-round, rather than nesting in northern Canada, then migrating south in winter — are a breed apart.

Although all Canada geese are protected by the Migratory Bird Act of 1918, the resident geese aren't, in the grand sense, migratory birds.

"They're really not migratory,'' said Dale May, director the DEP's wildlife division. "They're very prolific and they have a great rate of survival.''

The state's resident Canada goose flock has doubled in the past decade, May said. Coyote, fox and hawks may grab some nestlings every year, but once the birds can swim, they've got secure protection against most predators.

Nationwide, the resident Canada goose population in the Atlantic flyway has reached about 1 million birds and is increasing by about 1 percent a year. In the Mississippi flyway, the geese have increased by 5 percent a year since 1996 and now number 1.6 million.

"There's a lot of geese,'' said Craig Lewis of Danbury, who is training to get rid of them. "We have quite too many of them.''

Bands are attached to the legs of Connecticut‘s resident Canada geese to track the movement of the state‘s flock.

For that reason, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services, while offering all Canada geese protection, is preparing to transfer the responsibility of dealing with resident Canada geese to the states.

In November 2005 it published an environmental impact statement stating those goals. Nicholas Throckmorton, a spokesman for the agency, said it hopes to get the regulations in place by year's end.

"We do not consider resident Canada geese a species of conservation concern,'' Throckmorton said. "They're a bird that people see and identify with and we'd like to keep the flock at a sustainable level. But we also believe this is a problem that's best handled at the local level.''

The reasons people would like to reduce the flocks at their park, their golf course, or their lawn can often be boiled down to a one elementary fact about Canada geese — they are prodigious poopers, who leave many, many droppings as they graze.

"A goose can produce a pound and a half of droppings a day,'' Craig Lewis said. "It's all the time. If they're feeding on the grass, they're pooping on it.''

A band is put on a Canada goose near Candlewood Lake.

Besides being messy, the stuff is unsanitary. The bacteria in goose droppings can washing into lakes and ponds, increasing bacteria levels at beaches.

The DEP now has early hunting seasons in September that allow hunters to shoot as many as eight resident Canada geese a year. May said the bag limit declines in October, because that's when the resident flock mixes with the migrating birds.

"The fish and wildlife service is still trying to rebuild the migrating flocks,'' May said.

For goose lovers, this split — migrating birds good, resident birds bad — is vexing. If there is a growing resident Canada goose flock, they say, it's because humans have created it.

"It's people that introduced these birds," said Maggie Brasted, director of urban wildlife control research for the Humane Society of the United States. "To then say we have to kill them is unacceptable.''

The resident Canada goose population — a subspecies of the migratory birds — probably got established in Connecticut in the 19030s. Greg Chasko, assistant director of the DEP's wildlife division, said in the 1920s and 1930s, hunters used to buy geese to use as live decoys. When that practice was banned, he said, the hunters let the live decoys loose.

Fish and game clubs also brought geese to the state to increase the number of birds they could hunt. With few predators, the birds multiplied.

"It used to be, 20 years ago, that we'd get calls from people saying 'I've got a pair of Canada geese on my pond and it's wonderful.'' Then, 10 years ago, we began hearing, 'I've got 20 geese on my pond. What should I do?'' Now it's, 'I've got 50 Canada geese on my pond. Do anything — but get rid of them.'Ÿ"

Brasted said this increase is a result of human activity. People with big, green, well-fertilized, well cut lawns leading down to the edge of a lake have created "goose nirvana.''

"The thing geese like most is short, well-fertilized grass to feed on,'' she said. "The thing they like second best is open water for protection.''

Brasted and Sharon Pawlak, national coordinator of the Coalition to Prevent the Destruction of Canada Geese, also said that while goose droppings are bacteria-laden, there's no proof they cause human illness.

"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has no definitive proof to link goose feces to disease,'' Pawlak said. Generally, when a beach is closed it's because of human sewage. Man is the bigger polluter.''

Nuisance animal officers are trained to use several different techniques to move the flocks and keep them from growing.

They use dogs — especially border collies — to scatter them. They can use noise makers and sirens to scare them. They can use lasers to frighten them at night. They can spray the grass with chemicals to make it taste bad to geese.

"We can offer a complete management plan,'' said Mark Jones of Amtech in Danbury.

And they can addle goose eggs — shake them shortly after they're laid — to break the yolk, so the eggs never hatch into goslings.

Pawlak of the Coalition to Prevent the Destruction of Canada Geese said her group grudgingly accepts egg addling.

"We'd rather the eggs be addled, than the eggs hatch so people can gas the goslings to death later on,'' she said.

The harassment techniques can work to move the flock to another place. Paul Estafan, administer of the Danbury Municipal Airport, said he's used his Labrador retriever, Max, plus sirens and lights to successfully keep Canada geese away from airport runways.

"It's a lot of different techniques," Estafan said.

But Mark Jones of Danbury said sometimes all that harassment accomplishes is to makes the flock fly away temporarily, then return.

If all else fails, nuisance wildlife control officers will be now be able to herd the geese into a pen — for a few weeks in spring, when Canada geese are molting, they can't fly. They can then be captured, gassed with carbon dioxide, or taken to a poultry farm to be killed.

May of the DEP said any of the three groups mentioned in the 2004 state law — municipalities, homeowners associations or land trusts — will have to submit a goose management plan to the DEP, explaining what they've done so far to control nuisance geese and what they plan to do in the future.

Nuisance animal operators would also have to get a permit from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service if they planned to remove and kill a flock — something, May said, that isn't hard to obtain.

"They're pretty liberal about granting them,'' May said.

But Brasted of the Humane Society said both private landowners with grassy acres and cities with parks and golf courses must think about changing the landscape they've created.

By planting a thick strip of buffer plantings around ponds and lakes, she said, resident Canada geese can't waddle up for a meal.

"Geese are like people,'' she said. "They're looking for the easiest way to make a living. With a buffer garden, you can significantly reduce the problem.

"Maybe a few will show up. But most will go away.''

 

Contact Robert Miller
at bmiller@newstimes.com
or at (203) 731-3345.