In struggle to control geese, fewer holds barred

The end is near for five dozen resident Canada geese that make their home in a park near a Fairfax County landfill.

For years, the geese have settled along West Ox Road, grazing on grass at a nearby pond and laying their eggs. Unfortunately for them, their nesting spot is close to the county police department's heliport, where two helicopters are housed.

"There is a concern about the geese getting in the rotors," said Mary Ann Jennings, a county police spokeswoman.

Despite a number of attempts to shoo away the geese, including the use of paintball guns, they have refused to leave, officials say. One less-pleasant option is to drug and then gas them. But as Carol Bannerman, a spokeswoman with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Services, said, "You don't want to have a goofy duck near airplanes."

So federal wildlife employees are waiting for the right conditions, preferably a night with clear weather, to swoop in and corral them near the landfill, away from houses and people. Then the plan is to shoot the geese with guns equipped with silencers.

Fairfax's planned goose shoot is one of a number of arguably extreme methods being employed to reduce the region's growing population, which has been blamed for soil erosion, waterway degradation and potential human health hazards associated with goose droppings. It's also indicative of the difficulties faced in recent years in controlling an exploding population of geese that don't fly south for the winter, wildlife biologists and local officials say.

But animal rights advocates say nonlethal methods -- altering pond shorelines, planting different types of grass and addling eggs to control populations -- should take priority over controlled culling.

Resident Canada geese, nonmigratory birds long considered as much a suburban plague as deer, are protected under the Federal Migratory Bird Act of 1918, which makes it illegal to harm or injure a goose or to damage or move its eggs and nest without a federal permit.

Nationwide, resident Canada geese populations have nearly quadrupled in less than two decades to more than 5 million, and 1.1 million live in the Atlantic region flyway.

To combat the problem elsewhere in the mid-Atlantic region, where geese have become a problem for more than a few airplanes, they have been trapped and removed.

Many methods tried

In the Washington region, federal and state officials have used paintball guns, pyrotechnics, noisemakers and even oral contraceptives, all in an often-futile attempt to rid parks and public rights of way of the birds. In suburban Virginia and Maryland, at least two companies use border collies to chase geese off golf courses and other places, including USA Today's McLean headquarters and the CIA headquarters in Langley. They say business is booming.

"There's money out here, and if people are going to spend it on landscaping and geese are going to poop it up, then you're going to hear some yelling about it," said Dave Marcks, who runs a Geese Police Inc. franchise out of the Burke home he shares with his older brother, Doug, and two border collies, Max and Scott.