On Tue, 4 May 1999 tuisto at oz.net wrote:

> Personally, I'd rather deal with goose feces than put fences up along
> the shorelines, and I suspect that many geese will fly over these barriers,
> but at least these solutions recognize that the problem arises from abundant
> artificial habitat.

Many people love a nice lawn along the shore of a lake. Many of these same
people have a difficult time understanding where "wildlife management" is
when you need it. Canada Geese, in the absence of hunting (which fits these
urban areas pretty well), can increase by 30% per year. We have not yet
seen anything close their full potential to populate our cities. Yes, the
habitat they use is artificial and the numbers they have achieved are possible
because of the non-native vegetative communities we have created. So, why
do we not regard "management", that is killing some of them each year,
as a perfectly reasonable approach to managing our already intensively
managed and altered cities. These geese could be a ready source of food,
dependable and in good quantity... available for Thanksgiving dinners in
homeless shelters or wherever.

I don't encounter goose annoyances myself but I understand the complaints
of people with young children at parks where the lawns are thick with
feces. I also understand the difficulties of putting on a green equipped
with lots of little hazards. Swimmer's itch and algal blooms/fish kills in
lakes are also hard to accept. Sure, humans do lots of damage without the
help of the geese but why are we so reluctant to kill over-abundant geese.
We don't have problems with killing rats. People generally don't raise an
eyebrow about killing gophers, despite their being native and in severe
decline.

Kelly McAllister