Canada Geese Quite the Danbury Problem

UPDATE: THIS JUST IN FROM THE KENOSIA LAKE COMMISSION:

"Hi Mark, I am chairman of the Lake Kenosia Commission. Great article! Coincidentally, Rob Dorsch is my son so it was nice to have him included/pictured too. We will have the grand opening of our Buffer Gardens at Lake Kenosia on June 30th (rain date July 1st). It is a free event and it is open to the public. We will have a ribbon cutting ceremony with Mayor Mark Boughton; Live Birds of Prey; Kayaking demonstrations; garden tours; and just fun for the whole family! It is planned from 10am until 1pm on June 30th. I would love if you could incorporate this grand opening invitation into the Danbury Patch to get the word out. Many of us no longer receive the News Times so Patch is an excellent venue to get the news but especially our local news! Please also join us at the grand opening so that those who missed it will be able to read about what we have been doing at Lake Kenosia. The lake is a hidden jewell in Danbury and we would like to get the word out so that more people will use and enjoy all that it has to offer. We have worked hard to beautify the Lake with the Buffer Gardens so come and join us please. For any additional information, you can either e-mail me or call me on my cell which is (203) 994-1730. Thanks so much Mark, Regina."

Danbury and the Lake Kenosia Commission lined the Lake Kenosia beach with plantings designed to keep the Canada Geese off the beach. The plantings, more than a year old, are now mature.

"It's working," said Jack Kozuchowski, an environmental consultant with the city, who formerly held the position of environmental and occupational health coordinator with the city's Health and Social Services Department. "The plantings make them uncomfortable. They think a predator is hiding in there."

A quick sweep of the beach Friday showed three goose droppings. On the other side of the plantings, thousands of goose dropings covered the lawn.

If you visit the lake, you may not notice the plantings. What people see is Lake Kenosia, a beach, and then eight or 10 feet of various plants. After the plants comes the lawn. Beyond that, soccer fields. The lawn and soccer fields look like the Goose Super Pooper Highway.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Interested in Danbury’s news, events, community bulletins, blogs and businesses? Sign up for the free Danbury Patch newsletter, "like" us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter.

________________________________________________________________________________________

The plantings sound good. The question is whether it will work for the long haul. Plantings designed to make the geese uncomfortable are one of numerous options the city uses to move geese away from beaches, golf fairways, golf greens, the airport, baseball diamonds and parks. Geese like water and they like to eat grass.

"They're smart," said Rob Dorsch, certified golf course superintendent at the city's on Aunt Hack Road. Richter Park has all kinds of permissions from the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection to control Canada Geese. "We put up coyote decoys and that worked for a while."

Methods include: Shooting geese, shaking geese eggs to stop hatching, coating eggs with a chemical to stop hatching, running at geese, chasing geese with dogs, chasing geese with golf carts, firing noise makers to startle and scare geese.

The coyote decoys sat on polls and turned in the wind. Their tails were fluffy and floated in the breeze. Dorsch said at first, the geese flew away. After a while, the the geese got used to the life-sized, fluffy tailed coyote models, they started to walk up to them. In fact, all the coyotes were stolen earlier this year, so it is at least a possiblity the geese not only got used to the decoys, they liked them so much they took the coyotees home as pets.

The city tried a DEEP approved method of going to the geese nest and shaking the eggs or coating them with a chemical to make sure they didn't hatch. That is dangerous because geese parents protect their eggs.

"I don't do that," Dorsch said. The golf course shot about 16 geese two years ago, when it had a DEP license to kill 40. Dorsch said he doesn't really like that option either. "They're smarter than you think."

Richter Park tries with a variety of methods to rid itself of geese. Workers chase them with golf carts and use loud noises to scare them off. Dorsch said the geese fly away and haven't gotten hit by any golf carts. The loud noisemakers look like guns but sound like fire crackers.

Dorsch said the combination of all of those methods has cut the number of geese on the course from about 1,200 to 1,400 seven years ago to about 200 today.

Pete Deslin, who was working at Richter Park Friday, said geese used to eat his lawn on Franklin Street until it was destroyed by their constant feeding and the odor made it nasty to go outside.

Deslin said his goose problem is over, because hunters shot and killed the geese until the geese left the neighborhood.

"They'd eat the grass and leave droppings everywhere," Deslin said. "They've been gone for years. Whatever it takes to get them gone is good with me."

"They need to do something," said Lee Brown at Richter Park Friday. "When they're on the greens, that grass is short. They eat the green."

At, Airport Administrator Paul Estefan said today workers use noise makers to scatter the geese, which could cause accidents or collide with airplanes.

"We used Max," Estefan said, recalling his dog, which used to run the geese off the airport.

Daniel Baroody, associate director of Health in the Danbury Health and Social Services Department, said the city wants the geese off the beach at Lake Kenosia and off the beach at Candlewood Town Park because goose pooh adds fecal coliform to the water. The beaches have been closed in past summers because the water tested high for fecal coliform, and Baroody said that is goose pooh.

The lifeguards are trained to clean up the pooh on the beaches each morning, and discard it in garbage cans, not into the lake. He said they go out to the floating docks and collect that as well without washing it into the water.