Forrest is a three-year-old Border Collie and a frequent visitor at Monte Irvin Park in Orange. He’s the one wearing the bright-orange vest with ears pointing sharply into the air as he scans the horizon for the one thing he was trained to find – Canada geese.
“They’re not like normal dogs,” said Brook Bello, the dog’s master and owner of Geese Chasers of New Jersey. “They’re very work-oriented.”
In more than 100 parks and green spaces around the state, Forrest and Bello have an important year-round task called geese-chasing, one of the non-lethal methods of keeping the populations of this overabundant bird species in check. The mission is to “disturb” them, Bello said, with visits once or twice a day so that the geese can’t hang out long enough to lay eggs. On Bello’s commands, Forrest sprints into a flock and the startled geese take flight honking. The dogs are trained not to bite, nor growl. The whole interaction is over in a matter of seconds.
In the early 1900s, Canada geese were nearly hunted into extinction. Through conservation efforts, they have instead become overabundant. Today, they are the bane of many park and golf course groundskeepers. Although Canada geese are not invasive – meaning they live where nature intended them to live – what’s missing in urban areas is their natural predators, mostly foxes, that once kept their populations in check and performed the task that Forrest is hired to do.
Canada geese mate for life, which many find endearing. But the parents are territorial and overprotective of their brood and can turn aggressive to the public who wander too closely to a nest. Moreover, when left unchecked, a flock of geese can quickly overgraze a green space, turning it into a mud pit. That’s what happened in Nutley, when the health department had to shut down a local park. After exhausting other options, such as spraying a chemical called Methyl Anthranilate, the township finally hired Bello’s firm and now things are under control.
“You couldn’t walk on the sidewalks,” said Bello about the droppings that used to slick the walkways.
Though geese-chasing is year-round work, the industry’s busy season is April because that’s when these migratory birds lay eggs. It’s also the time when many municipalities shore up contracts with different firms offering a variety of crowd-control strategies. At the last town council meeting, West Orange signed a contract with Goose Control Technology to use the egg-addling method, which involves spraying goose eggs with corn oil to stifle the growth of an embryo before a gosling can form. The other non-lethal methods include geese-chasing – what Bello does – along with chemical sprays. In Edgewater, the parks department began using habitat modification, which uses landscaping to ward off the unwanted birds.
But Bello believes in the chasing method because of how incredibly stubborn these creatures are in finding a place to nest. She has found geese eggs in places you would never believe — on rooftops, along train tracks, in parking lots, on artificial turf, even in a dumpster.
These nonlethal methods have their naysayers and the most ardent critics stalk the comment section of Bello’s Facebook page. The say, chemical sprays wash away in the rain. Geese-chasing is costly. Egg-addling is cruel to the mother birds. Bello – who calls herself an “animal lover” – believes these people are mistaken.
“A lot of the time people don’t like seeing a dog charge at a geese,” she said. “But what’s the alternative?”
There is an alternative, but it is a lethal one that some Essex County residents might be surprised is happening in their local park. In the wee hours of a summer morning, a time of year when when the geese molt their feathers and become temporarily flightless, officials from the United States Department of Agriculture enter Weequahic Park and Branch Brook Park, round up all the Canada geese into trucks, and “remove” them with carbon dioxide. That is the word the USDA uses in its report, but it is a euphemism that masks a “horrific” process, according to Doreen Frega, an outreach worker for the Animal Protection League of New Jersey.
There is also language in Goose Control Technology’s contract with West Orange that allows for lethal “removal,” but stipulates it is only at the township’s request.
Frega has been one of the state’s most vocal opponents of using lethal gas and has been pressuring the county commissioners to end the practice. For one, the roundup is indiscriminate, she said, meaning if there are other species in the vicinity, including ducks, swans, even squirrels and deer, they die alongside the geese. The carbon dioxide isn’t an instant death, but a drawn-out agonizing one. It takes about 15 minutes for the animals to die, but can take as long as 45 minutes, Frega said.
“They’re crying, they’re groaning,” she said. “It’s horrific.”
The culprit behind the lethal gas method is Newark Liberty International Airport and Teterboro Airport who hire a team within the USDA called Wildlife Services. However, the federal government can’t enter county parks without a majority vote from the board of commissioners, hence why Frega has focused her advocacy on petitioning them to deny access. Last year, 9 geese were killed in Weequahic, 36 at Branch Brook. At the Essex County Correctional Facility in Port Newark, 24 were killed.
“It’s been a long hard fight and we’ve gotten nowhere,” Frega said.
Airline officials believe this method is justified because Canada geese, they argue, pose a threat to air travel safety. You may remember the so-called Miracle on the Hudson, when in 2009 Captain Sullenberger landed US Airways Flight 1459 in the Hudson River after it had been struck by a bird, causing engine failure. That bird ended up being a Canada goose. This incident spooked the airline industry, which enacted a zero-tolerance policy toward geese in the flightpath. In the aftermath of the Flight 1459 birdstrike, the metropolitan area’s geese population was reduced from 20,000 to 1,235 using the lethal gas method, the New York Times reported.
But Frega believes the nonlethal methods have proven successful. In fact, Bello’s geese-chasing firms also work in Weequahic and Branch Brook and neither can explain why the same park would need to employ both lethal and non-lethal methods simultaneously. Further, new technology called Robin Radar, designed by Dutch tech entrepreneur Siete Hamminga, can alert airport control when geese are in flight near the airport in time for a pilot to circle until the path clears. The technology has been used by the Royal Netherlands Air Force since the 1980s.
Last week, when Bello arrived on a routine visit near the playground at Liberty State Park, where the 36-year-old has been bringing her dogs for the past three years, no geese were in sight. That’s a source of pride for Bello, who remembers when the park was overrun with them.
“The geese don’t even try to nest here anymore,” she said. “After three consecutive seasons of being at a site, they eventually gave up.”
Across the entire park grounds, she found only four total Canada geese that day, First, Forrest chased away a pair near the abandoned tracks of the Central Railroad Terminal. Then over by the Empty Sky Memorial, he scared off another pair that was camouflaged inside a flock of Brant. She admits that when she came into the industry at 25 years old, geese-chasing as a method was not as structured as it has become – and she and her husband, Joseph Bello, take credit for applying a rigid system that includes location trackers on their work vehicles to deploy one of their chasers if a geese is found.
“There are still people that don’t know our industry exists,” Bello said.
