Winter 2002

Wild & Messy

By Nancy Shepherdson

The non-migratory subspecies called the giant Canada goose was once thought to be extinct. As the goslings and thousands like them demonstrate, they've made a big comeback in the Chicago region – too big for some folks. Photo: Art Morris/BIRDS AS ART.

As individuals, Canada geese are magnificent birds. It's hard not to admire a creature with such a regal bearing and sense of divine right to all it surveys. Branta canadensis even has good family values, remaining loyal to a single mate and devotedly raising as many goslings as possible, year after year. And that’s the trouble. There is rarely only one to admire, but dozens. Like a royal family gone to seed, it often seems that the hoards of layabouts just get larger, louder, and messier every year.

And that shouldn't surprise us one bit. After all, we started laying out the red carpet for them more than 20 years ago when expanses of grass and pretty stormwater ponds began spreading throughout the area. "It's not the geese's fault that they love it here," says John Pence, manager of interpretive and natural resources for the Wheaton Park District. "We've created a Club Med for them."

It is important to note that Chicago Wilderness harbors two distinct types of geese. The vast majority are migratory, spending summers in Canada and winters way south. The resident population, a subspecies once thought to be extinct, represent a conservation success story.

The typical suburban park or corporate campus is, in fact, goose heaven. Fertilized turf grass produces yummy tender shoots. Ponds provide an easy escape from danger and a safe place to sleep at night. Mowing down to the water’s edge eliminates places for predators to hide. Add an island for safe nesting and perhaps a fountain to keep the water open in the winter and you've created a year-round paradise for geese.

Lovely as they are, our resident geese lack an active booster club. A full 60 percent of homeowners in the Chicago metropolitan region would like to see a decrease in goose population, according to a 2001 survey of attitudes toward nuisance wildlife conducted by the Illinois Natural History Survey. More than a third reported that they had personally experienced problems associated with, let’s not mince words here, gobs of greasy goose poop.

Resident geese congregate around ponds such as this one at Fermilab, which has open water through the winter. But they feed mostly on lawns and agricultural lands. Photo: Brian Bates.

Canada geese produce about a pound of droppings per goose per day. In a marvel of digestive speed, they can transform food to waste in as little as seven minutes. (Scientists at Cornell University discovered that – better thee than me is all I can say.)

Geese are also a nuisance in that if enough of them show up, they can practically denude an area of ground cover. Yet, unlike deer, geese don’t seem to critically endanger the ecosystem, at least in this region, when their numbers become excessive. If geese eat all the food in a particular area, they just move on, allowing it to regenerate.

So the trick may be simply to keep the population from getting larger and shoo geese away from problem areas so that geese and humans can stay out of each other’s hair (or feathers). Unfortunately, that’s much harder to accomplish than it appears and a fair number of Chicagoans are sufficiently honked off about geese that they’re trying to do something about it.

Goose Chase

At the BP (formerly Amoco) corporate campus in Naperville, Larry Bazarko remembers that, up to about five years ago, “the sky would almost turn black” with geese during spring and fall migration. “I’m not sure how they kept from hitting each other as they came in for a landing.” He says that when the company first started trying to control geese on the 12-acre lake, “we tried everything from sound cannons to inflatable plastic alligators we set adrift in the lake.” They also brought in a pair of swans, which were thought at the time to be masterful at persuading geese to go elsewhere.

Nothing worked very well or for very long to shoo the geese away; it turns out that swans are quite friendly with geese except during the mating season, and noisemakers only work until the geese notice their buddies aren’t dying from the “gunfire.”

Now Bazarko uses two primary control methods at the BP campus. The first is shoreline landscaping, mainly with the native grass called little bluestem. These dense plants make geese nervous because they can’t see over them – or into them, where predators may be lurking. Geese will tend to avoid places where it isn’t easy to move from food source (grass) to safety (water).

And when landscaping isn’t enough, both corporations and natural areas can now call out the dogs. Border collies, to be specific. Both BP and the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe, among others, have called upon the 14 border collies employed by Migratory Bird Management. Sue Hagberg started the company in 1997 as an offshoot of her commercial landscaping business.

Watching these dogs in action, you get the sense that all these friendly black and white dogs really want to do is herd each flock of geese into a pen. Noiselessly approaching the geese, they crouch down low and move quickly to the right or left trying to block their escape. But the geese will have none of it and take honking, protesting flight as soon as they realize that these dogs mean business.

Hagberg takes the dogs out mornings and afternoons during migration season to clear geese from clients’ properties. This not only prevents a single flock from spending the night, but encourages other flocks to fly on as well. “If geese fly over an attractive-looking landing site the dogs have cleared and it doesn’t have any geese on it,” she says, “they’ll think something is wrong with it and fly on.”

That approach has certainly worked at the Chicago Botanic Garden. “Our number one visitor complaint in the past was geese and their mess,” says Tom Tiddens, integrated pest management supervisor for the garden. “We had to snow shovel the poop off our walks, believe it or not, before the dogs started coming out.” They are often there all day during migrations, two or three times a day at other times of the year. Do border collies solve the problem? It would seem so. "In the spring we used to count 2,000 to 3,000 geese a day on our lakes; now we count no more than 50," says Tiddens with relief. "We're trying to create a balance."

The Garden's $13 million water garden now under construction in the Great Basin was also planned with an eye to ward geese away from the new collections of rare water plants, which they might otherwise trample or eat. All along the shorelines, shelves for plants will be covered with less than a foot of water and planted with tall species native to Illinois like sweet flag, swamp dock, and lake sedge.

A similar scheme has already made the newest Lake County forest preserve off-putting for geese. At Independence Grove in Libertyville, turf grass goes down to the water's edge only in a few spots reserved for fishing. The rest of the extensive shoreline in this former rock quarry has either been given over to shelving for water plants or has been left unmowed so that prairie grasses can take root.

Scrambled Eggs, Cooked Goose

But what can you do if you've tried everything and you’re still hip-deep in geese? Or what if someone else is doing a better job of moving geese along and they end up on your property instead? This has been a big problem for forest preserves and parks, especially in DuPage County.

One way to reduce overall population growth is to get state and federal permits to begin egg and nest depredation. With a permit, egg shaking (also called egg addling) is allowed for a limited period of time after the eggs are laid. The addled eggs are then put back in the nests. Most of the parent birds will continue to incubate the eggs until it is too late in the season to lay a new clutch.

The Forest Preserve District of DuPage County began an egg addling program in 1994 when hundreds of goslings each spring was the norm. “You’re kind of stuck,” says Dan Ludwig, the district’s animal ecologist. “Both people and geese like mowed grass. We can deal with the effects of 60 geese, but not 240 or more – the number there would be next year if all those eggs hatched.” Now eight forest preserve employees devote 3-4 working days each for 2-3 weeks in the spring to shaking eggs, usually finding all but one or two nests a season at problem preserves. Ludwig figures the district still saves money since damage and clean-up costs prior to the program’s start amounted to about $50,000 per year.

What egg shaking and harassment methods cannot do is get to the root of the problem. The Canada goose, barring disease, accident, starvation, and hunters, is a remarkably long-lived bird. The average life span for a goose that survives to adulthood is 6-8 years, although they can survive for more than 20 years, considerably longer than most birds.

However, many states, including Wisconsin and Minnesota, are reducing goose populations even in urban areas through lethal means. Under a federal Canada goose management permit, these states allow “lethal culling” of geese. Geese are rounded up in the early summer when they are molting and flightless. These birds are then humanely slaughtered and the meat distributed to the needy, mostly through food pantries.

As might be expected, these programs are controversial. “We consider harvesting geese for food to be inhumane and also are unsure about the safety and quality of the meat,” warns Lynn Mooney, program coordinator of the Humane Society of the United States’ Central States Regional Office in Naperville. Still, she agrees that in certain cases, reducing the population is the only way to protect the birds from harm. “There are times when all other population control methods fail,” she says. “In these cases, if scientific study has been done and a sharpshooter can help prevent starvation or cruel acts by frustrated people, we may reluctantly agree that lethal solutions are sometimes necessary.”

Not that it’s all that easy to get a handle on the goose population hereabouts. Mainly, it involves a lot of paddling and slogging around swamps in hip waders – and putting up with a fair share of hissing and honking. That’s where Charlie Paine and his team of scientists at the Max McGraw Wildlife Foundation in Dundee come in.

Many people feed geese and are happy to have them as wildlife neighbors. Photo: Kim Karpeles, Life Through the Lens.

Counting Beaks

Charlie Paine knows Chicago's geese up close and personally. As part of a three-year study, he and his team have been using helicopters, radio tagging, and egg surveys to count them, track their death rates, and determine nesting success. Or lack of it. Nothing will make you as sympathetic to the daily struggle of Everygoose like coming upon a nest full of broken eggs all eaten by a predator.

Combing a wooded island in Schaumburg’s Busse Woods with grad student Mikal Cline, even the most hardened goose hater will begin to hope that the next nest, or the next, will have warm eggs in it, with chicks inside tapping to get out. Sometimes you find them, protected by parents who would love to get a piece of you. “Yes, you’re scary,” coos Cline after she’s nudged the male away from the nest with her kit bag, and he proceeds to attack it with vigor, wings outspread, honking and hissing.

And sometimes you find nothing but the bleached bones of an adult, next to her shattered eggs. “Probably a coyote. Their populations are growing, too, as they adapt to suburban landscapes,” Cline mutters as she notes the depredation on her notecards. She figures it probably swam out to this island for its meal.

Cline’s findings, and those of three teams assisting her in northeastern Illinois (excepting the city of Chicago), will be used to estimate the number of young surviving to adulthood as well as the kind of environments most – and least – conducive to nest success, which ranged from 25 to 50 percent over the last two years. Helicopter surveys allow researchers to estimate the number of resident birds. Radio tagging allows the tracking of both movements and adult survival.

It turns out, not surprisingly, that the perfect habitat for nest success is an island in a pond. The Ameritech campus in Hoffman Estates, with mowed turf grass leading to the pond’s edge, is a prime example of this ideal spot for geese. But geese also do surprisingly well nesting in what Paine calls “weird human association spots” like the parking lot of the Costco store in Schaumburg. Raised planters there provide protection from traffic and the clear sight lines geese love.

Put it all together and you have an estimate of whether geese are a growing problem, requiring additional management, or whether we have pretty much gotten it under control. The statewide resident goose population is about 86,000, a big chunk of which nest in the Chicago region. Paine and his colleagues are seeking to understand the biology of geese to develop a population model that will allow the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR) to evaluate what certain types of management may do. "This will certainly include continued use of border collies and habitat modification that move birds out of problem areas," says Paine, "and it may well include increased egg shaking to reduce birth rates, and possibly in extreme cases culling of problem geese." Paine's model will incorporate population size, and birth and death rates, so IDNR can decide how to reduce human-goose conflicts while still providing for a robust and healthy goose population. "The goose problem is not really a biological issue," Paine says. "It's more of a human dimensions question. How many geese are people willing to put up with, how much are they willing to spend to deal with the problem, and what kinds of control methods are acceptable? Our model will help IDNR with the technical side of that equation."

Or maybe we should do what the Wheaton Park District has done to eliminate the only thing that really bothers people about geese. Their staff now regularly operate a $20,000 riding goose poop vacuum.