As a mommy goose and daddy goose escorted five adorable goslings across a neighborhood pond and onto the grass in Farmington Hills the other day, I had to wonder:
At what point do they teach the kiddies to be malevolent bastards?
The Michigan Department of Natural Resources, in tribute to the foul temper, prodigious pooping and other grating characteristics of Canada geese, had announced in March that it was planning to collect and whack thousands of them, rather than just relocate them and let them get back to the business of creating further objectionable versions of themselves.
The public squawked, and as our Jalen Williams reported March 13, the DNR has decided to instead just speak to them sternly and return to the controls that don’t seem to do much, but don’t involve goose murder.
Each of nature’s creatures has a purpose, after all, even tarantulas, though it would be nice if tarantulas’ purpose was to chase off geese.
As for geese, they remain grumpy, territorial, intrusive, violent and messy. Oh, and they can be asymptomatic carriers of avian flu.
So this seems like a good time to pass along a few state-approved goose-repelling tips, which involve Kool-Aid and laser pointers. And for those who don’t have to deal with geese and are wondering what all the fuss is about, they poop every 12 minutes, for a total that might reach 2 pounds a day.
The goslings are adorable, but Ryan Gosling is cute, too, and if he pooped on your lawn every 12 minutes, you’d buy a German shepherd.
A pecking order of solutions
The late newscaster Rich Fisher was a member at Oakland Hills Country Club, and he once excitedly told me that the course had solved the goose problem in its ponds by using decoys that resembled dead waterfowl.
Two weeks later came a woeful update. The geese had figured out the scam, he said, had returned in even greater numbers, and were using the decoys as pool toys.
Where geese are concerned, the DNR has basically been swimming upstream for decades.
The best time to corral them is June, when they’re molting and can’t get airborne. The goal is to capture them in places they’re not welcome, drive them to more welcoming state land, and hope they don’t remember they can fly.
Hunting season helps, but the goal is to keep the population at 175,000 to 225,000, and the past few years it has topped 300,000. Destroying nests and eggs is allowed in certain cases with permits, but mostly people just try to chase them off and make their problem someone else’s.
The DNR’s list of suggestions includes “shell crackers, screamers, bird alarms, motion detector accessories, electronic noise systems, bird bangers, rockets, and distress cries,” with the understanding that remedies need to be switched frequently so the geese don’t wise up.
One form of goose Kryptonite, oddly, is the smell of grapes, which might mean a chemical compound or could be as simple as mixing five packets of unsweetened Kool-Aid into a gallon of water and spraying it where the geese like to congregate.
Brant Kessel, the closest homeowner to the Farmington Hills pond where the five goslings were serving their apprenticeship, said he has had good luck with a laser pointer — but only in green.
“Point it at the ground around them. They run from it,” he said.
The pond population has dropped by at least 50% over the years since he and the geese saw the light, he said — but once they lay eggs, they’re not budging.
Geese gonna goose
As a volunteer and now assistant director of the Association to Rescue Kritters, or ARK, Jared Wright has been on many wild goose chases.
“They are very hard to catch,” said Wright, who is based about 12 miles southeast of Roscommon in St. Helen.
If a goose has an injured leg, it can still fly. If the problem is a wing, it can still swim. Once you catch a goose, it has a unique way to express its displeasure.
“If you look at the structure of their wing,” he said, “they have a knobby bone specifically for beating you with.”
The experience is so commonplace it has a name, “flogging.”
For now, ARK is saying flog you to geese, but it’s not by choice. Because geese can be carriers of avian flu without showing any ill effects, he said, it’s too great a risk to bring them into the shelter.
A positive test might force the euthanizing of every other bird in the facility, including a beloved 25-year-old barn owl and 22-year-old vulture.
The shelter has state permits to treat everything but bears, bats, skunks and wolves. Otters, yes. Bobcats, eagles, all the reptiles, sure. But for geese, there’s no room at the ARK — with one exception.
“We did just take a baby,” Wright said, a foundling who had been separated from her family.
Most likely, he said, she couldn’t keep up. Also possibly, she was chased off by her siblings. If geese had opposable thumbs, they’d have thrown her under the bus.
Instead, Wright’s team drove her around until they found a family with similar-size goslings and turned her loose to join the clan. Or expire, if things don’t work out, but that’s natural selection and not the state of Michigan hiring contractors to euthanize geese with carbon dioxide.
“Geese are not known for being friendly,” Wright conceded, but that’s just how they roll. Or waddle.
“Simply because geese are doing geese things,” he contended, “is not a reason to exterminate them.”
Bunnies, he pointed out, “poop 350-ish pellets a day. And we’re not rounding up rabbits.”
It could be geese just need a better publicist. Failing that, though, they might try better attitudes.
Neal Rubin once saw a goose steal a chicken wrap from a golf cart, which leads to all sorts of unsettling thoughts. Reach him at NARubin@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan won’t exterminate geese — so what’s the next step?
Reporting by Neal Rubin, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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