Thursday, March 12, 2009

How to get rid of Canadian geese - You can not kill them

My wife, who is not as patient as I am, basically feels that the best way to get rid of geese is to kill them. Of course she does not want to kill the geese herself she wants me to kill the geese. I’m guessing that though she would rather have me kill them, she actually would kill the geese herself if I didn’t stop her. She is a very clean person and the mess from the geese really bothers her a lot more than it does me.

The first issue is that it is a federal crime to kill geese. I have read this in several places and I’m pretty sure that it is true. There is something about a treaty between the U.S. and Canadian governments (really, look it up) that makes it a U.S. crime to kill Canadian geese.

The other problem is that there are a lot of consequences of killing them. The first obviously is what to do with the dead geese. We actually had one die on our lawn last year and we had a big debate as to what to do with the dead goose. Geese are not small birds and the carcass weighed about 20 pounds. It was difficult, but with a couple of shovels we managed to get it into a garbage bag. In the end we dumped it at the town dump but did not tell anyone there was a dead goose in the bag. It looked like it might have been shot and we didn’t want to deal with the legal issues even though we didn’t do it.

She really wants me to shoot the geese as a sort of revenge for all of the mess that they have left on the lawn. However I think that shooting the geese will attract a lot more attention from neighbors and officials than we want to deal with. Also, I am not that good a shot so I would have to use a shotgun and that could conceivably leave goose parts that we would have to deal with, and we are back to dealing with the dead geese.

The other thing my wife has suggested is putting out poison for the geese. Even though that may pass off the dead goose problem to the neighbors, there is the risk that the poison will impact other wildlife, and of course animal poison is not a good thing to have around children.

For me the worst case scenario of killing the geese is that we would use poison and them come back to the lake house after a week or two and find dead and rotting geese on the lawn. As my wife points out it would be a one time problem, but it would be a lot worse than picking up the goose poop from the lawn.

So as much as I want to get rid of the Canadian geese I have not yet reached the point where I am willing to kill the geese to get rid of them.

Sunday, March 8, 2009

How to get rid of canadian geese - repellents

This is my ongoing discussion of what I learned in my effort to figure out how to get rid of canadian geese at my lake house. This is actually the third topic but I sent the second to one of those ezine places to see how that worked (as soon as the link is live I'll add a pointer to it.)

So, another thing that is often tried to get rid of canadian geese is goose repellent. I ordered one on line and used it, but with only limited success. There are several goose repellents available and I don't want to mention which one I bought but it was one of the all natural repellents. This is the first thing to think about because you are going to wind up spraying the repellent near and, at least a little bit, in the water. There are state laws about what you can put in the water and frankly you don't wand to poison your lake just to get rid of the geese. This repellent was a basically a combination of peppers and strong oils like mint and cinnamon. The good news is that it didn't really small that bad. (I have also used deer off to keep the deer out of the shrubs, and that makes everything smell like rotten eggs). Yes we have geese to get rid of int eh summer and deer to get rid of in the winter.

The goal of the repellent is to make the grass not taste good so the geese do not want to eat it. The catch with this is that, as I have said before, geese are dumb, so they seem to have to try something a whole bunch of times before they realize that they don't like it. That is the first problem. However, I don't know if we gave it a fair chance due to the second problem.

The second problem is that the instructions tell you not to apply the repellent if the grass is wet or if it is going to rain in the next few days. That means that you have to find a several day window with no rain. Since, again, this is a weekend house and we only have two days a week and not every week to try to get rid of the geese, finding that window was difficult and several of the goose repellent applications would up being on damp grass or wound up getting rained on. So, when we came back a week later and the geese had been on the lawn again it was tough to tell if the goose repellent actually worked. Did the geese simply not mind it or did the rain wash it away so the geese did not taste it?

The third problem I had with the goose repellent was more technical. As I said the formula included pepper an that meant that there were actual black pepper grounds in the goose repellent. These grounds tended to get caught in the nozzle of the sprayer and clog it up.

I was hoping that the goose repellent would be an easy solution to get rid of the canadian geese without having to be there that often, but in the end I did not find it as useful as I hoped. I certainly would not say that it was to solution of my problem of how to get rid of canadian geese.

Thursday, March 5, 2009

How to Get Rid of Canadian Geese - Intro

We have spent the past few years dealing with figuring out how to get rid of canadian geese at out lake house. As we start getting ready for another year of the battle against the geese and keeping goose poop off our lawn, I though I would share what I have learned.

Over the last few years we have tried a bunch of solutions including repellents, sprays, decoys, fences, Mylar, even kids throwing rocks. We have had some successes and a lot of failure, but we've learned a lot.

Here is the background. We have a cabin on a lake in eastern New Hampshire with about an acre of cleared grassy lawn around the house and gently sloping to the water. This turns out to be the perfect location for a flock of Canadian geese. One weekend we went up to the house and found goose poop everywhere. I mean everywhere. It is really remarkable how much poop a goose can make. I took the better part of the afternoon to clean it all up. This began our adventure with trying to keep the geese off the lawn.

It turned out to be a flock of seven Canadian geese who were making themselves at home on the lake and coming up onto the lawns around the lake to eat and poop. We started by trying to scare them off and made a game out of it for the kids who were constantly on the lookout for the geese and would chase them back into the lake whenever they came near. We even let the kids throw rocks at them since the likelihood of them actually hitting a goose was low.

Unfortunately that was a solution that only worked while we were there and since this is a weekend vacation house, the geese had all week to get back onto the lawn and leave goose poop everywhere again. Soon the goose poop cleanup became a regular part of the weekend visits. My wife was ready to start shooting them, but a quick Google search turned up the fact that it is a federal crime to kill canadian geese. She was so frustrated that she was willing to go ahead anyway, but I didn't want to deal with cleaning up dead geese if I could help it (more on that later in the story).

I'll follow up in upcoming posts about the methds we tried and what we have com up with to get rid of canadian geese.