• print
• Share | e-mail Facebook Tweet Digg StumbleUpon Delicious Google Yahoo Buzz

 more photos | order photo

Geese gather on the edge of the Deschutes River in Drake Park in Bend on Wednesday afternoon. For a year starting in summer 2007, a biologist monitored the population at Drake Park and other sites around Deschutes County to gather data to help guide future management decisions.
Dean Guernsey The Bulletin

(Still) learning to manage our geese

New federal study to help local officials figure out strategy

By Kate Ramsayer / The Bulletin

The Canada geese that waddle across Drake Park, the greens of Awbrey Glen and other Central Oregon sites aren’t as uniform as they may appear.

Some hunker down in one spot, year after year, growing accustomed to people and the treats some feed them. Others drop in on different sites in the county or the Pacific Northwest. And some geese are just passing through, shying away from humans they encounter on their trek between Canada and California.

A new study describes these different geese that make up the gaggles in Deschutes County’s parks, ponds and golf courses, and recommends strategies for dealing with the entrenched birds, whose droppings and at times aggressive behavior generate complaints.

“We’re trying to use the data to come up with a responsible plan of action, site by site,” said Mike Slater, with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services.

The federal agency surveyed geese at 11 sites in Deschutes County each week from July 2007 to July 2008. Biologists also tagged some of the nesting geese to track them if they moved between sites. The $15,000 project was funded mostly by the Bend Park & Recreation District, with additional funds from the landowners of the other sites.

“We get a lot of complaints about goose feces on the turf, and it costs a lot of money for us to clean up after the geese,” said Paul Stell, natural resources manager with the Bend park district. In 2002, goose cleanup cost the park district more than $10,000.

And as landowners try different methods — from shaking eggs to harassing adults with paint balls or water guns — to stem increasing numbers of geese, wildlife officials wanted a local study that could help guide future decisions for Deschutes County.

“We need to have a little more data to go on,” Slater said of the idea behind the study. “You can’t just go barging in there with guns ablazing, and think that’s necessarily going to work. Because if you’re not targeting the right geese, you’re not helping.”

Tracking geese

So a biologist with Wildlife Services counted birds, and noted the bands that identified where the bird was originally tagged — an orange band on the right leg for Bend parks geese, a blue band on the right foot for Black Butte Ranch, a red band on the left foot for Eagle Crest and so on.

The agency also got information from hunters who legally shot eight of the tagged birds and reported where each was killed, with four shot in Bend by the same hunter, one shot in Sisters, two in Redmond, one in Washington and one in Canada. The hunting results were surprising, Slater said.

“We didn’t think that these birds were generally making it out of town to be harvested by hunters,” he said.

“A few of these birds are meandering enough to get into places where they can be hunted,” he said. “These are resident Canada geese, but what it’s telling us is there’s varying levels of residency.”

And based on how much a bird likes to stick around the nest or is inclined to fly farther afield, the biologists assign Deschutes County geese to one of four categories.

“We found that there were true resident birds that we could always count on being there,” Slater said. “You do this four times a month for a year, you kind of start to recognize them in a weird way.” The biologists termed those homebody geese “core residents.”

Then there were birds who flew a bit farther, dubbed the “local residents.” Biologists observed these birds moving between the Bend parks, the Awbrey Glen golf course and the Rock Arbor Villa on Bend’s east side, and other geese appeared to take occasional trips between Bend, Redmond and Sisters.

In fact, the surveyors found that when the weather got bad, the goose population dropped in Bend and Black Butte Ranch but increased significantly in Redmond, Slater said.

The third group, “regional residents,” traveled around the Northwest, Slater said.

And the last category? True migratory geese, who make the trip between California and their namesake Canada, and show up here in the spring and fall. “You see during the migratory season swelling of numbers,” Slater said.

The troublemakers

But it’s not the migratory birds that cause most of the problems, like goose feces in parks, said Stell, with the parks department.

“What we need to do is get these geese that never leave the park,” Stell said. “We need to have a more mobile population of geese that would do less damage.”

The resident birds are a higher priority, he said. With fewer residents, the park district could be able to spend less on manpower and machines to clean up goose feces, and would probably also receive fewer goose-related complaints from the public.

“We’d see a population of geese that was much more mobile, and their habits would be a little more natural.”

Population control

In the study, Wildlife Services has a list of recommendations for landowners looking to cut down on the number of geese — and the messes they cause. The next step, Slater said, is to sit down with those landowners, as well as the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, to draw up site-specific plans.

For hazing the geese, Slater said, landowners could use tools like chemical repellent, noisemakers and physical barriers, depending on the situations. But geese that have lived in a place for years won’t be fazed, Slater said.

“We’re going to be looking at those birds that have the behaviors people are complaining about,” he said, like the resident birds that run up to people and damage landscapes.

If officials are going to kill problem geese, ways to round up resident birds include trapping them in funnel traps, hiding drugs in bait and capturing them with nets shot from an air cannon.

“For the most part, the core residents are going to be the ones that will come up and approach that equipment without really worrying about it,” Slater said. “They’re so used to people, they’re so used to things.”

And some of the management plans could include killing some geese, he said, but that would require permits from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as well as the state’s OK.

What’s next?

The state agency will work with Wildlife Services and landowners in looking at options, said Brad Bales, migratory game bird biologist with the state Department of Fish and Wildlife — but will make sure that people have a chance to comment on any plans.

“We want to make sure that the public’s been involved, and we want to make sure we hear what they’re saying,” he said. “Goose control can be very controversial.”

And Stell said the park department would approach any lethal strategies with caution, adding the goal is to get the goose population to a more natural state.

“We always want to have geese on Mirror Pond,” he said. “(It’s) an icon for the community, and that’s something we always want to be able to enjoy.”

Kate Ramsayer can be reached at 541-617-7811 or at kramsayer@bendbulletin.com.

• print
• Share | e-mail Facebook Tweet Digg StumbleUpon Delicious Google Yahoo Buzz