Where Geese Were Thinned, Their Population Thickens

Five weeks after wildlife authorities rounded up Prospect Park’s geese and gassed them, provoking the ire of residents and wildlife advocates alike, legions of new, death-defying geese continue to move into the prime real estate that is Prospect Park Lake.

Residents said 107 geese have moved into the lake at Prospect Park.Ruby Washington/The New York Times Residents said 107 geese have moved into the lake at Prospect Park.

Anne-Katrin Titze and Ed Bahlman, Brooklyn residents who discovered the birds’ disappearance last month, counted 107 geese on Prospect Park Lake on Sunday. “They are clearly replacing the ones that were killed,” Ms. Titze said, although she lamented that some had already fallen prey to barbed lures and fishing line that were left in the lake.

The 107 geese have their flight feathers, Ms. Titze noted, and were slowly learning the ways of the park.

“They’re landing in perfect surroundings,” she said.

Last month, wildlife biologists and Agriculture Department officials rounded up the park’s 400 resident geese and gassed them with lethal doses of carbon dioxide, saying the effort was necessary to keep them out of the flight paths of La Guardia and Kennedy Airports. The authorities had been quietly killing geese since a few flew into the engines of US Airways Flight 1549 in January 2009, forcing it to land in the Hudson River. But the mass kill in July infuriated Brooklyn residents and wildlife advocates, who were quick to point out that the geese that brought down the flight were migratory, not resident.

“These geese were chasing away the newcomers — they were like property owners,” Mr. Bahlman said. By late July, 28 Canada geese were counted in the park. Now, their numbers are at 25 percent of the population before the mass kill.

Officials want to eliminate most of the geese that live within seven miles of the airports. The Agriculture Department has not yet completed a report on the exact number of geese killed this summer, a spokeswoman said.

Henry J. Stern, the former New York City parks commissioner, said he was troubled that residents were not notified of the killings, and that no process was followed.

“We don’t want any geese to jeopardize human life — we don’t value geese over people,” Mr. Stern said. “But you would have some sort of explanation and some sort of certainty or knowledge that these geese are guilty.”

He said residents were more distressed by the goose killings than the people in charge of caring for the parks were. “They would never initiate a goose kill,” he said of parks managers. “But they’re not sitting shiva.”

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They should put a bounty on them and open a special hunting season. These once-threatened birds have been “protected” to the point that they’re now pests that threaten human safety. Enough is enough.


Please leave the birds alone this time. More will keep coming back anyway – it’s a lake, and they are water birds.

They should just drain all the lakes in all the parks. A small price to pay for air safety. While they are at it, why not just drain all the water from all the rivers, oceans and park ponds, too? This is a typical example of expediency over common sense.

Whatever happened to puttng some type of screening over the planes intake engines or whatever, so that no birds can be sucked in?

can’t our electronic wizards develope a soung or motion that scares them away from flight paths? It would be this centuries version of the good old “scarecrow”. Slaughtering them , just doesn’t seem right

There should be a memorial to Sticky, who had an arrow in his throat, and then was gassed along with the rest.

Curious thing about the original story on Prospect Park Goosicide, there was a story at the same time in Oregon about the same sort of goose kill. Except in Oregon the killers behaved like farmers, they processed the geese and gave the birds away. Why can’t these folks in NY acts like farmers, most likely there’s a few human foragers poaching a goose now and then from city parks. Or has the city removed itself from the country so long that only the foxes and coyotes are allowed to have a decent meal?

Why don’t they just let people eat ’em?

Isn’t it amazing that our fellow creatures are only looking to share the planet with us — despite what we’ve done to most of their natural habitats — rather than with any malice. We should be so good. Please leave these geese alone!

Yes, and then they should cut down all the trees — can’t have branches falling on people and killing them. I mean, I value human life over plant life, don’t you?

Intolerant humans have already taken claim over most of the land and cleared out the mightiest predators like bears, mountain lions, wolves, and coyotes. Now, paranoid people with the same destructive mentality are focusing on both the land AND the sky with the purpose of eliminating Canadian geese first, and when that’s done they’ll begin to target another docile, non-threatening animal. It’s pure fear-mongering. The recent statistics at JFK Airport show that bird/ plane strikes have decreased due to their management program. And they are not yet employing radar and other available tools to coordinate and time flights between flocks of migrating birds, so the statistics can be improved. If we could put a man on the moon, surely jets can be designed so that a 15 pound bird does not pose a deadly threat. The recent count of Canadian Geese in NY State indicates an average of 4 geese per square mile. What scientific data has been presented that classifies their numbers as overpopulation? If we are interested in properly applying science and engineering to conservation and preservation then we have a lot more work to do before unleashing secret government death squads in the dark of night.

I know how awful the previous killing was, really I do, but that the Ag Dept. is being thwarted by Mother Nature amuses me. The fact is that this site is very attractive to birds, and trying to stop them from living there is a losing battle. You’d think the Ag Dept would realize that, as would the wildlife biologists.

Time to do it again since there seems to be no shortage of geese.

Kill ’em and grill ’em. Don’t gas ’em.

Cheryl – Walton, NY August 17, 2010 · 2:46 pm

Animals are a danger to humans. Therefore, we must kill all the animals! Kill them! Kill them! Kill them before they GET US!!!

Sounds like some people in our government, the very same one we give our money to in the form of taxes so they can remove all the dangers in our lives (such as geese flying into a jet engine), have lost touch with reality.

I love these geese, wondering if we can come out with a win-win solution. money is no problem, fed doesnt even have to print these days, just issue some treasury notes.

We built the planes, and the airports–making them bird-proof should be our problem, not the birds’. Don’t kill them. Don’t eat them. Why can’t people just leave them alone.

Whenever there is heavy predation upon a species, the resilient ones will find ways to “fill up the holes.” Usually, the animals will breed more to make up for the losses or, as in the example of this aricle, new ones will move in to fill the vacancy. This is true of Canada geese, coyotes and even, dare we say, humans. When did the “baby boom” occur? After World War 2. Why do those in impoverished countries have so many babies? Because, few of the children survive to adulthood. We need to wake up and realize that mass slaughters of a species don’t solve a problem, they add to it. Of course, if there are enough of the slaughters across the country, in addition to expanded hunting, nest destruction and egg addling, then it is certainly possible to drive any species to extinction. Noting how the hunters and wildlife “experts” almost drove Canada geese to extinction in the last century, only to then “manage” them to what they claim now is “overpopulation” it seems the wildlife biologists can’t get it right. Just leave the geese ALONE and they will figure it out what is the “right population” for them. Geese are not stupid.

Well, this sure makes things easy. No hunting required.

Just wait until their number hits 400 or so, and do it all over again! And again. And again, until they’ve gone the way of the dodo.

If only rats would be so cooperative!

Be kind to your web-footed friends.


A growing and increasingly influential movement of philosophers, ethicists, law professors and activists are convinced that the great moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals.
Michael Pollan

Great news!

Apparently, Prospect Park’s pond is an effective lure attracting these filthy and dangerous pests. The more that flock there — the more that can be eliminated in an efficient manner.

Presumably there are other “hot” spots also known about that serve a similar purpose.

Well, of course new geese came in to fill the void. There’s an existing ecological niche and whether via migration or reproduction, species will fill it.

Oh, and, um, yeah, serves them right gassing them in the first place.

Never in the history of modern aviation have geese caused a commercial airliner to crash with fatal results. 1549 though certainly a close call was by any measure a fluke, unprecedented, in fact, and factors beyond birds may have contributed to its demise. The FAA had warned in weeks prior to the incident that the engines of the A320 were prone to a peculiar type of stall, and two days prior to the incident, on January 13, such a stall occured on the same plane that was forced to ditch in the Hudson. DNA extracted from the engines revealed two or three separate birds were ingested in total, which wouldn’t necessarily indicate simultaneous and complete failure of both engines, the left one at one point bursting into flames according to passenger accounts.
The necessity of the culling in terms of aviation safety is not supported statistically (pigeons have been implicated in three of the five major commercial airliner collisions since 1975, none of which involved geese), and even if it were, it apparently didn’t work, as new geese are filling the void as predicted.