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Nackawic isn’t the only community wrestling with burgeoning goose populations.
Ottawa, Gatineau and the National Capital Commission launched a program three years ago to try to discourage geese, ducks, pigeons and gulls from over-populating parks and the banks of the Ottawa River and the beaches of Gatineau Park.
Jasmine Leduc, a spokeswoman with the commission, said the third year of the campaign is starting to show success. This year the population of 500 geese dropped by about 50 per cent.
Working with the Canadian Wildlife Service, the cities and National Capital Commission have been working to change habitat to make it less hospitable to geese as nesting and grazing sites.
“There’s many initiatives that we’ve been doing … The National Capital Commission is reducing the frequency of grass cutting because manicured lawns provide high quality food for geese and the longer grass will discourage the geese from nesting in these areas,” Leduc said.
Fencing and shrubs were also added.
“This technique is successful because clear lines of sight allow geese to feel safe, so by blocking those the areas are less appealing to the geese,” Leduc said.
No-bird-feeding signs have also been posted and information flyers have been distributed to the public, explaining the effects of feeding geese. In some areas, a trained border collie was used to disturb the birds.
The National Capital Commission and the two cities said they didn’t contemplate killing the birds because the other techniques are showing success.
Some members of the Save the Geese group are drafting a petition asking for a halt to the execution of the birds in Nackawic over the next three weeks and York North MLA Kirk MacDonald has been asked to intervene, but MacDonald said it’s a federal responsibility.
The town obtained a lethal-removal permit from the Canadian Wildlife Service, which allows it to remove a maximum of 250 Canadian geese. At mid-week, about 205 geese were counted along the shoreline of the St. John River in Nackawic. The geese have taken over 10 hectares of downtown green space and become a nuisance to some. Tourists have complained they can’t walk through the area due to bird feces.
“It’s my understanding that they (the Canadian Wildlife Service) don’t issue these permits lightly,” MacDonald said.
The geese were introduced to New Brunswick in the late 1990s when former New Brunswick premier Frank McKenna was persuaded to help conserve the geese because the City of Toronto had an abundance of the birds that were messing up its waterfront.
New Brunswick accepted a few dozen of the geese in a conservation effort, but their breeding population has swelled to 7,000.
The federal government is trying to keep the numbers down to 6,000. Since 2008, the Canadian Wildlife Service has permitted the geese to be hunted for the first three weeks in September after Labour Day. The Ontario geese have acclimatized to Canadian weather and stick around far longer than migrating Canadian geese.
While the town hasn’t said where, when and how it will kill the birds, it will tackle the job while the birds are moulting and can’t fly, which coincides with the first three weeks of July.
The permit issued to the Town of Nackawic by the Canadian Wildlife Service specifies that the geese must be destroyed following the guidelines of the Canadian Council on Animal Care. The council is the national organization responsible for setting and maintaining standards for the ethical use and care of animals in science in Canada.
In its guidelines, the organization said the birds can be collected by netting them either on land or over water.
The procedures mention different types of nets, such as mist nets, rocket nets, nets fired from helicopters over flocks of birds such as moulting waterfowl.
The birds can then be collected in covered pens, cloth bags or cages if they are going to be moved.
Nackawic’s plan is to collect the geese and move them to another location where they’ll be killed and buried.