Park geese euthanized to control population
July 23, 2013
By Christina Corrales-Toy
Lake Sammamish State Park visitors will likely notice significantly fewer geese, and as a result fewer geese feces, the next time they visit the park.
Public health concerns over the park’s growing population of geese led state park officials to authorize the killing of about 90 birds, said Virginia Painter, spokeswoman for Washington State Parks.
In the spring, the park had about 300 geese, threatening an overbalance of one species, which could be harmful to both people and the area’s ecology, Painter said.
“In the case of Canada geese, their feces contain a bunch of disease-causing organisms,” she said. “Those organisms are probably in the water and on the beach all over the place anyway, but when you get an overbalance, that’s when people can really get sick from it.”
Goose feces could be carriers of the parasite giardia, which causes a gastrointestinal infection, as well as bacteria such as E. coli and salmonella.
LynnM - That story brought a tear to my eye! Except for the part where they stopped killing the geese.
My son and I like going “duck hunting” in the park. We go around and try to find some ducks that aren’t surrounded by geese and we feed them bread crumbs. Once the geese catch on and come over to demand some, we leave and go find some other ducks. The ducks have a hard time competing with the geese, so I’m happy to throw them a crumb or two.
That’s very heartwarming, but it ended 11 years ago. We need goose gassing everywhere and every year.
To answer the OP, no, there shouldn’t be open season on geese in the US. It wouldn’t do any good. These lazy shit factories never fly anywhere where they could be safely hunted. They live out their lives in suburban office parks, stuff their faces on lawn grass, shit out a nest full of goslings every spring, and never leave the metro area.
Kill 'em all, and let the misbegotten deity who created them sort them out.
This might be a stupid question but…do Canada geese hang around in many places that are open to hunting? I only ever see them in my neighborhood (all houses, not forest) or at the school next door in the ballfields.
Would “open season” with hunters and weapons be useful? Or is it more useful to keep doing what August West and LynnM describe?
Yeah still curious though, because other populations are controlled by hunting. Just wondering if it was possible with geese or too hard to find them in hunting areas.
I see a revenue source for cash-strapped cities and counties:
Auction off a limited number of temporary geese-kill licenses.
These temporary licenses would give the license-holder both the right and obligation to kill X-number of geese.
There would be three kinds of licenses:
1–License holder shall use only hand-held non-ballistic weapons such as clubs, baseball bats, bludgeons, blackjacks, cudgels, shillelaghs, tire irons, or golf clubs.
2–License holder shall use only hand-held sharp-edged and/or pointed weapons such as swiss army knives, kitchen knives, ice-picks, hatchets, broadaxes, or swords.
3–License holder shall dress in full-body black-hooded garb and use only a large scythe.
Hell, this could be a roving weekend party. I’d invest in a piece of the popcorn and drinks concessions.
There are old-fashioned migratory geese, noble and majestic birds, that make epic flights to Canada every spring and to the Southern US every fall. These can be, and are, hunted in the course of their migrations.
Then there are lazy shit-factory geese that have figured out that there are enough unfrozen (because circulated) office and condo ponds, stubble vegetation, and asshole humans (who feed them) so that they can survive in the northern US all winter. They never migrate more than a few miles, encounter few predators, cannot be safely hunted, and eat breed and shit their lives away. They need to die.
RadioLab did a segment on this. Apparently the law isn’t a normal US law. It’s a treaty with Canada. The gist is some dude was shooting birds somewhere where it was legal and the neighboring town or county or state had no way of stopping what was happening not in their state. Also the federal government had no way to pass a law governing shooting birds (Federalism).
To get around that, the USA forged a treaty with Canada.
Kinda blew my mind when I heard that.
So for the USA to allow shooting geese, they would have to amend a treaty with Canada.
You need to think outside of the box. Tell those Canucks to come get their fucking geese or we start teaching every school age child how to behead the beasts with machetes.
Speaking from a central NJ perspective - allowing gun/bow hunting wouldn’t help with our problem. This area is widely and densely developed, and they live and breed right in the middle of all of it. You couldn’t safely allow gun/bow hunting around here. Reducing the populations in the faraway places where it might be safely allowed would have a negligible effect on my poop-strewn sidewalk.
Now, LynnM’s idea involves no projectile weapons. I’m not only on board with the idea, but I think I’ve fallen slightly in love with her.
What about allowing lasso-ing? I’d think they’d be pretty easy to lasso, given the way their necks stick up. The population of NJ isn’t renowned for its lassoing skills, but it would be a great incentive to learn.
So, let’s amend it.
The treaty applies to migratory birds, anyway. These are a subset of Canada geese that are not migratory, which is exactly what causes the problem. Find a way to differentiate between the migratory and non-migratory Canada geese, and you’ve got an angle. (maybe “If it’s migration season, no killing. They could be legit birdies just taking a rest. If it’s a time of year when they should definitely be south or north, then they’re toast.”)
the bird is a migratory bird and covered by treaty with Canada.
because of environmental changes in both countries some of those birds no longer migrate. they can find food and nesting year round when it previously was seasonal. when it was seasonal they migrated on flyways which are the locations for the hunting areas.
they no longer move near these hunting zones. they stay in parks and golf courses. now you could have some hunting on golf courses, if it’s wearing plaid then don’t shoot.
They utterly invaded my college campus while I was there. They talked about putting something on the grass to drive them away. Whatever it was involved the word ‘poison’ and there was a bit of an uproar…an uproar from the neighboring counties (where I lived when I wasn’t living on campus) that didn’t have geese.
The argument against them was what you’d expect. How dare you poision these beautiful animals. blah blah blah.
But we had to walk around with these disgusting things. The sidewalks were covered in goose crap. For those that don’t know what it looks like, it’s not like bird poop, it’s like dog/cat poop. It very quickly became commonplace to take off your shoes as soon as you got into the dorms because it looked like you had been walking around in the mud. And the hissing, they were downright nasty if you got to close. These weren’t the geese you and grandma used to toss stale bread at from 20 feet away. These things would block the sidewalk and hiss at you. I don’t know if they ever got rid of them, but we sure hated them.