Rick Shadel is a goose predator.

Bob Donaldson/Post-Gazette
Canada geese feed at the youth baseball field at Springdale Borough park. The droppings the geese leave behind are a problem.

He buzzes Canada geese with remote control airplanes, blazes them with nighttime lasers and spotlights, blasts the air around them with pyrotechnics, grids ponds with string so they can't land, intimidates them with coyote effigies planted near dead-goose decoys and treats the grass they eat to give them bellyaches.

People pay Shadel, senior partner at a wildlife control company based in Hanover, outside of Harrisburg, to rid their property of the birds.

Anyone who has experienced the ultimate gross-out -- sliding across a ball field slicked with Canada goose droppings -- knows why controlling them has become a significant business, even spawning a National Goose Management Training Academy in Indianapolis.

The goose, whose population is exploding nationwide, is a formidable opponent in the turf wars being waged in office parks, housing developments, municipal parks and private lawns across the nation.

Though it's mostly a human vs. animal conflict, the geese have allies among animal-loving, animal-feeding humans as well as in animal rights groups. In Westmoreland County last week, the decision to allow the birds to be hunted in four parks brought out protesters who fought for their winged friends by trying to scare them off before hunters could shoot them.

The geese in question are resident geese, not the kind that fly overhead in picturesque V formations in the spring and fall. The resident type earns its name by settling in the same environment suburban humans find appealing: places with manicured grass, a nice quiet pool of water and no predators.

An adult Canada goose weighs from 10 to 17 pounds, eats up to 4 pounds of grass a day and returns about 11/2 pounds of that in unappetizing cigar-shaped form that fouls water and can make parks, lawns and ball fields unusable to humans. There are more than 3.5 million geese in the United States (some estimates put the number at 5 million), with a population that is growing from 10 percent to 17 percent a year.

Canada geese are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1916. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service believes that most of these geese don't belong under the act because they don't really migrate and thus should not qualify for protection.

The resident geese are descendants of fairly sedentary strains of Canada geese and of released flocks of birds used as decoys.

By the 1930s, hunting had reduced migrating geese populations so much that there were concerted efforts to save them.

When the migratory birds virtually disappeared in Pennsylvania, a race called giant Canadas from Minnesota and Wisconsin were introduced here, said Margaret Brittingham, professor of wildlife resources in the College of Agricultural Sciences at Penn State. They were larger than the Atlantic migrants and never migrated much from their homes in the Midwest.

"So, of course, they never migrated in Pennsylvania, either," Brittingham said.

A home of their own

During the same period, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service outlawed the use of live decoys -- trapped birds used to attract geese to an area where hunters were waiting. Many hunting clubs released large flocks of geese they had kept to use as decoys. Those birds had adapted to living year-round in the areas where they had been trapped and had lost their migratory instincts.

	John Beale/Post-Gazette
	A hunter walks through Twin Lakes Park in Westmoreland County last week in search of geese.

Not everyone makes the distinction between resident and wild geese. The groups look alike, sharing the same black-headed, white-throated characteristics.

The Coalition to Protect Canada Geese sees the separate categorization as a way to evade the protection accorded migrating birds. It is opposed to measures that would make it easier to destroy the geese.

Though not different enough from one another to qualify as subspecies, they are different races of Canada geese, Brittingham said. The resident geese are larger than the migrants, and their behavior is quite different.

The residents are getting more and more numerous because their introduction was coupled with a change in land use. When Americans decided that suburban homes and office parks with large lawns were pleasant places to live and work, they inadvertently created the perfect environment for a goose population explosion.

"Before then, we didn't have large business parks or corporate centers with large manicured lawns and retention ponds and no predators to speak of," said Shadel, who expanded his S&S Wildlife Control to include a Canada Goose Management division to accommodate the growing business.

Now federal and state officials face huge populations of resident geese, while migrant groups continue to decline. News reports of geese taking over parks and office complexes appeared this summer in communities from New Jersey to California.

In a rule change pushed by state wildlife agents and expected to be put into place this fall, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans to delegate authority to the states to issue permits to kill resident Canada geese and their eggs. Right now, permits can take months to get and in some states, such as Indiana, killing geese is forbidden.

The plan's goal is to reduce nonmigrating geese populations by more than a million birds over several years. The Humane Society of the U.S., a Washington-based animal-protection group, calls it a plan for "mass killing."

The changes being considered won't lift all protection of the geese, but "the preferred alternative is to allow states more leeway," said Nicholas Throckmorton, a spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

A war of wills

From 60,000 to 70,000 nonmigratory geese are taken by hunters each year in Pennsylvania, according to the state Game Commission. But that number doesn't keep up with the population, and hunting can't be used in many areas where geese are flourishing -- urban parks and suburban shopping and business areas.

So people turn to outfits like Wild Goose Chase, run by Gretta MacIntyre, who uses border collies from her Washington County farm to chase off geese, or Federal Goose Control of Maryland, which has its own Goose University to train purebred border collies, and Goose Chaser II boats for ponds.

Solutions aren't cheap. Westmoreland County Parks Maintenance Coordinator Adrian Horvath said he was given an estimate of $40,000 to $50,000 by a goose control company for clearing out the county parks. "If I had that kind of money, I would be using it for new playground equipment," he said.

Guy Costa, director of public works for Pittsburgh, said the biggest problem areas were Point State Park and the North Shore Riverfront Park.

The city has used a chemical that discourages the geese from nesting, he said. The Sports & Exhibition Authority employed MacIntyre and her collies to chase geese from the North Shore.

Chasing them off only works to an extent. "They just walk away, jump in the river, then come back when you're gone," Costa said.

Costa said the problem seemed to have abated somewhat, though he still gets calls and his crews still routinely clean up goose excrement.

"Oh, yeah. They do leave a mess behind."

He said he was opposed to the idea of killing geese, and that, at any rate, it wouldn't be permitted inside the city.

Horvath, who said he had had problems for eight to 10 years with geese in Westmoreland parks, said he had tried a wide variety of solutions and gone to seminars to try to figure out how to lower the goose populations. He's used dogs, noise-making devices ("They just wandered by them and kind of looked at them.") swans ('They're supposed to be rivals, but they swam around together.") aerated the water in the lakes, which he said he must now treat as if it were sewer water because of the fecal matter, and shot blanks at the geese.

Controlled hunting has reduced the population at Mammoth Park from a high of about 400 birds to about 30 or 40, he said, and he believes that's proven to be the most effective method.

Show them who's boss

Though killing might seem like the ultimate end to the problem, Shadel said it usually took a combination of techniques to get the geese to leave. If you kill geese that live in a goose-friendly environment, another group is likely to spot the vacant digs and move in.

So Shadel uses remote-control boats and planes, fireworks shot from a device similar to a starter's pistol, lasers and spotlights, border collies, dead goose decoys, coyote effigies, chemical lawn treatments and fake distress calls.

He also addles and oils eggs. Addling is shaking them so the gosling won't hatch. "Though a simple task, addling requires one to search through heavy cover, endure ticks and mosquitoes, and the occasional flogging by an aggressive gander," Shadel says on his Web page. Oiling prevents the egg from taking in oxygen and also stops hatching. Destroying eggs doesn't work because the goose will lay another set, but if her eggs are oiled or addled, she will continue tending them.

During much of the summer, when humans are likely to be in the spaces occupied by geese, the geese are molting and cannot fly. So something as simple as fencing them off can work during that period, or rounding them up and relocating them.

Shadel said he learned some of his strategies from his own background growing up on a farm near Hershey and some at National Goose Control Training Academy, where everything from biology to addling is taught.

"We inject the predator in our approach to the geese," he said. "We want them to see humans as predators, because, in so many cases, they are used to humans not being predators. We stalk them. They soon recognize that we are not their friends."

Often flocks have been in place for long periods and have become inured to the various things tried by humans to get rid of them.

"Geese are at sites for three reasons," he said. "Safety, food and imprinted nesting site. The goal is to remove at least one of those, two if you can. You want the goose to conclude, 'This is not a good place to raise my family.' "

You do that by creating an environment that seems unsafe to the goose. "We want to scare the bejeezus out of them so they decide it's not worth it to stay." Geese sleep on open water for the sake of safety, for example, so shining bright lights at them during the night makes them feel unsafe.

When he starts a job, he has crew members on site constantly, he said.

"Twenty-four hours a day, all day long, there's somebody on site. So if the geese challenge the site at 1 in the morning, we're there, or at 2 in the afternoon, we're always there to challenge them." The terms used in the trade are "hazing" and "harassment."

There are no fail-safe methods, though.

"We find geese that are quite persistent. They've been there for years, they've been around people for years, they're used to noise. You come swaggering in with your pyrotechnic shooter and they just look at you."

Changing the habitat is one of the best ways to manage the population, Penn State's Brittingham said. "They're grazers, but they like to scan for predators. If you have a big corporate area with a pond and a lawn that extends through 10 acres, you can break up that area by adding shrubs and low brushy vegetation." That both reduces their food supply of grass and makes it harder for them to look for predators.

Getting the humans to stop making the geese feel welcome, particularly by feeding them, also helps.

Peter McKosky, a Belle Vernon native and member of Voices For Animal Liberation, was one of the protesters in Westmoreland County last week.

He said park officials had allowed the geese to become a problem by not enforcing a ban on animal feeding at the parks.

But geese don't really need the incentive of human waiters to serve them food to settle in, Shadel said. They're grazers, and if they find a big swath of grass, they'll dig in on their own. In fact, they often act more like a herd of cows than a flock of birds, ambling slowly around and concentrating on eating more than anything else.

"Because we have changed the environment, because we have eliminated other predators, it's incumbent upon us as highest order of predator to be surrogate predators," he said.