The Vancouver Park Board says it’s seeing promising results from a new pilot project which uses a piece of equipment it is calling the “goose pooper scooper.”
Towed behind a tractor, the machine picks up about 80 per cent of the goose droppings on fields and lawns, according to Dana McDonald, the board’s environmental stewardship coordinator.
McDonald says the board only has one of the machines, but it is being used across several impacted areas, including English Bay, Sunset Beach, and David Lam Park.
“We’re testing it out to see how it how it works, and then we will evaluate where it gets deployed, and whether or not it’s reasonable to purchase more,” she said.
The issue of dealing with goose droppings is an ongoing problem, she says.
“The geese that we see around are resident geese,”she said.
“So they are part of a population that was brought here in the 60s and 70s for wildlife viewing and hunting, and they don’t migrate. So they’re just here all year round.”
She says conflicts with people are possible year-round, but there are certain times of the year it is worse.
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“These geese right now, in particular, in this month of June, is they are in what’s called molt, which means that they’ve lost their flight feathers, they are finished nesting, and they’re raising their young,” McDonald said.
“And the term that’s actually used to describe what they’re doing right now is ‘loafing.’ They really they don’t move around much, and they eat and they poop.”
McDonald says that last year, the board was considering the use of a lethal method to remove some geese.
“That was one of a suite of actions that could be taken as part of the approved Canada Goose management plan that the elected board approved last spring,” she said.
“And if we were to advance with lethal removal, we would work with regulators to make sure that we had all of the appropriate measures in place.”
Before moving ahead with lethal removal, the board would have to demonstrate it has taken all other reasonable actions to deal with the issue.
“So we’re focusing the available resources that we have right now on making sure that that we are are comprehensively using all of our other tools, and may look to population reduction effort in the future, but it’s not our focus at the moment,” she said.
McDonald says the board is currently also using an egg addling method as a means of slowing population growth.
“It’s something that’s done every year, and that means switching out fertilised eggs with a non-viable egg so that they don’t hatch,” she said.
“For example, last year, we addled 826 eggs, meaning that’s 826 geese that haven’t entered the breeding population.”
This year, the board is planning to keep monitoring the situation to understand the size and distribution of the population.
“We’ll be banding several geese so that we can start understanding how they move around the city and the region,” she said.