New Canaan soon will see border collies chasing off the Canada geese that gather and soil playing fields at the middle and high schools.
For years, the town has successfully used a Wilton-based company to rid Mead Park of the geese there, according to John Howe, New Canaan’s director of parks and recreation.
“We don’t harm the geese by any means,” Howe told members of the Board of Selectmen at their regular meeting, held Tuesday at Town Hall and via videoconference.
“At the high school and Saxe, they’re going to do twice a day, seven days a week, but they’re offering us to do more in the beginning because they feel that they’re going to fly from Saxe to the high school and back and forth,” he said. “So they’re planning on coming at least three times a day until they can consistently move them.”
First Selectman Dionna Carlson and Selectmen Steve Karl and Amy Murphy Carroll voted 3-0 to approve a one-year $9,900 contract with Geese Relief for services at Saxe Middle School and New Canaan High School.
Murphy Carroll asked what the company actually will do when they arrive (bring out border collies to chase the geese away), whether the geese are smart (smart enough to recognize the Geese Relief vehicle) and how often the dogs are run (twice per day at Mead and they’ll work every day except Sunday the schools).
She also asked whether the town could acquire its own border collies to do the job, for example, within an invisible fence.
Howe said in response: “That’s one of the things that’s happened to a lot of the golf courses. They get a border collie and if they don’t work the dog, the geese don’t care anymore. So the dog becomes lazy if they’re not being formally instructed to keep going. For us, no. And we wouldn’t want to leave a dog off-leash.”
Karl noted that town officials have received many letters, emails and even photos about how bad the problem is at the NCHS track.
“Everybody obviously is out there walking, running, and that’s just an absolute mess,” Karl said.
Howe said the new program would help.
“Today there was a guy that went up to blow goose droppings off the track,” he said. “We think it will help a lot. This is in the budget. We added $10,000 into last year’s budget to do exactly this.”
Carlson asked whether the increased chasing would just move the geese from one area to another, and whether the birds would just wind up somewhere like Kiwanis or Waveny Park.
Howe said the geese only go to the schools to eat the well-maintained grass, “but there’s a lot of places where there’s other grass.”
“They do not like to fly,” he said. “They would like to sit out there all day long and not be bothered and they’re not nesting there, so moving them is a little bit easier.” (The geese have nested in the past at Mead Park, which requires Geese Relief to go out in a canoe to the nests on the island there in order to “addle” the eggs so they don’t hatch.)
For whatever reason, the geese very rarely touch down on the soccer fields at Waveny.
Carlson said, “I just worry that’ll be where they go next.”
Howe said it’s possible, or Irwin Park, though the Weed Street park has a substantial tree canopy that makes the grounds feel less safe for geese to stop and feed.
He noted that the geese here don’t migrate—they’re “resident Canada geese.”
“We probably would only complain about a couple of weeks at most if they migrated,” he said.