Plagued by geese, a city pays for drones and dogs to scare them away

Angie Orellana Hernandez

The Canada geese produce hundreds of pounds of droppings a day, mess up bacteria levels in the local lagoons and sometimes scare children. Now a Northern California city is poised to spend nearly $400 000 to get rid of them.

The waterfowl have long posed a problem for Foster City, with up to 400 birds in the roughly 33 000-person community at a given time. After several experiments with less expensive options, the San Francisco Bay Area city is ready to pull out all the stops to chase them away: drones shaped like falcons, border collies to mimic predators and remote-controlled devices that can float in water.

“If we can find a way to manage this in a way that geese and people can coexist without conflict, that would be a huge success,” said Parks and Recreation Director Derek Schweigart. “We’ve just gotten to the point where the population has gotten so large that it is overwhelming.”

The plan is poised to start early September, Schweigart said.

Cities and states across the country deal with nuisance animals in different ways. In Florida, local authorities will approve a limited number of permits to allow the hunting of black bears in select areas this year. Michigan’s Natural Resources Commission voted in August to reinstate year-long coyote hunting.

Foster City approved a plan in 2021 to kill more than 100 geese, but it was withdrawn after public backlash, Schweigart said. Then the city tried nonlethal methods, including egg addling - a population management technique that involves coating an egg with oil so it stops developing - and installing fences around parks. But the geese remained.

A migratory species, Canada geese used to leave Northeast California in the winters and head to the state’s warmer Central Valley, said Melanie Weaver, a senior environmental scientist in the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s waterfowl unit. But in recent years, the geese have been staying up north because of lush public parks, tranquil ponds and access to an easy food supply.

“We, collectively as humans, have provided them a great place to hang out and raise young,” Weaver said. “There’s not many things that can take them out except for perhaps a coyote or a golden eagle. You’ve got people giving them handouts. It’s a recipe for disaster.”

The city has allocated about $390 000 to the pilot programme. Schweigart said the investment will be worth it in the long run if it saves the city the tens of thousands it has spent every year on increased maintenance and power washing costs because of the geese.

Wildlife Innovations, a firm the city hired to carry out the program, will initially focus on the seven parks that have seen the most geese activity and public complaints, Schweigart said. Jake Manley, president of Wildlife Innovations, and Daniel Biteman, a wildlife biologist there, said they’re considering various strategies because geese are clever and quickly pick up on changes to their environment.

“One portion of this is don’t throw everything at them at once,” Manley said. “Don’t put all your cards on the table at once. Every time they start acclimating, throw something new that they haven’t seen.”

Biteman and Manley are weighing using dog teams, such as border collies and other herders, to simulate predators so the geese will flee. They’re also considering employing devices that work on both land and water to drive them out of the area, or drones to fly over the animals.

If the geese get used to regular drones, Biteman and Manley said, they can attach red flashing lights or make them emit distress calls. Other drones can be equipped with flappy wings to appear like falcons, Biteman said.

The goal is to make the environment as uncomfortable as possible for the geese while minimizing disturbances to human residents.

“We continually change it up until they don’t have a chance,” Manley said of the geese.

If the geese move on from Foster City, Weaver warned that they’ll probably take up residence somewhere nearby. Weaver said it will take “working with your neighbors” to avoid pushing the geese around from city to city.

At least in Foster City, Schweigart acknowledged, there will always be some number of geese.

“We’ve created this environment,” he said. “It’s going to be attractive. Our goal would be to see measurable decreases, not only in the volume of geese that are present, but more importantly, measure it by the amount of feces that’s reduced.”