Town officials last week approved a $25,000 contract with a Greenwich-based company that visits Mead Park every day of the year to keep the Canada geese out.
The Board of Selectmen during its July 9 meeting voted 3-0 in favor of the contract with Geese Relief, which also works for a fixed period each summer in Kiwanis Park.
Parks & Recreation Director John Howe said the company “comes to Mead Park twice a day, every day of the year.”
“And we’ve drastically reduced the population of Canada geese in Mead Park,” he said at the meeting, held in Town Hall and via videoconference.
First Selectman Dionna Carlson and Selectmen Steve Karl and Amy Murphy Carroll voted in favor of the contract.
Geese Relief brings border collies to Mead and also paddles out to the island in the park to “addle” Canada goose eggs there. After float-testing an egg to ensure its air sac hasn’t developed, workers coat an egg with oil in order to seal out oxygen and prevent the egg from hatching. The mother goose continues to sit on the egg in hopes that it hatches. The geese come to view the area as bad for reproduction and do not seek to nest there again.
Hazing with trained border collies and egg addling are PETA-approved methods of Canada goose population control.
Murphy Carroll noted that when she drives back from the New Canaan YMCA past the Saxe playing fields the geese are sometimes out in full force.
“It’s a party,” she said.
Howe agreed and said his department put in $10,000 more in the budget for the current fiscal year “to work on it,” though it wasn’t clear what that would involve.
“But we’re not ready for approval for that because we want to check a couple vendors and make sure we’re in a good place and what we exactly should do,” he said.
He said later in the meeting that the fields at Saxe and New Canaan High School are different from Mead in that the geese are there to feed rather than to nest. There’s a risk that company hired to shoo away the geese could show up at the wrong time of day and miss the birds completely, he said.
“So that’s why we’re trying to figure out exactly how we should do that,” Howe said.
The selectman asked about whether border collies could be deployed for longer periods of time within an electric fence at Saxe (golf courses sometimes do that but it’s difficult to pull off because the dogs himself can get lazy) and whether the Geese Relief people come for an hour or two daily (less).
Howe said the geese have come to recognize the company’s vans and “just as soon as the doors open up, you can see them fly off.”
Carlson said she was glad to hear that Parks & Rec is “exploring other vendors potentially.”
Kudos for doing this!!
There has been a drastic decline in the geese population on the beach in Kiwanis Park compared to last summer.
However, there are 4 permanent geese who are either on the beach, strolling through the pavilion, or nibbling away the grass in the front field. To beat the heat they nap in the shade along the row of trees that run parallel to the driveway.
Thank you to all who made this possible. This little gem of a park has been impossible to enjoy in recent years due to the geese and the reminders they leave behind. This makes all the difference!
Just wanted to say we used Geese Relief for several years at our old house in Westport, which had a pond plagued by geese. In my experience, the Geese Relief folks know all the ways of geese and how to deal with their tendency to watch carefully and to learn their “enemy vehicles.”
My husband and I hope that New Canaan will retain their services; the town is unlikely to find a more competent or responsive business.
The other thing that was quite helpful to them and to us was that I sometimes acted as the “geese lookout” – if I was home and saw geese when Relief was not there, I would text them and they would often come immediately.