Hazel Johnson moved to her house on New Bedford's Sassaquin Pond 15 years ago because she wanted to be close to the water.
In addition to the water, Ms. Johnson also got some unexpected feathered neighbors: the Canada geese who make the pond their home.



"When I first moved here, I wanted to feed them and everything because they were so cute," said Ms. Johnson, now retired. But her attitude toward the geese has changed dramatically over the years.

"They're beautiful," she said. "But they're mean, and they're very dirty."

Canada geese have become a near-constant annoyance in recent years for Ms. Johnson and her neighbors around the pond as the geese seem to spend as much time on people's lawns, grazing and leaving their droppings, as they do on the pond.

As the Canada geese population has grown exponentially over the past several decades, more and more residents are seeing these majestic birds as a major nuisance. The birds have made their presence felt not just in residential neighborhoods, but also at other SouthCoast sites, including several area golf courses. Places like Allendale Country Club and Acushnet River Valley Golf Course have used dogs to chase the geese away.

There are various methods people can use to minimize the impact the resident geese have on their neighborhoods and towns, from hunting at one end of the spectrum to planting coyote decoys in lawns at the other end. But no matter which method is used, the key to success is persistence.

"You basically have to want to get rid of the geese more than the geese want to stay," said H. Huesmann, a state waterfowl biologist.

The very humans who are now so annoyed by the geese are somewhat to blame for their presence. In the early part of the 20th century, many hunters used domesticated Canada geese as live decoys. This practice was outlawed in the 1930s, but by then the geese had had their migratory instincts bred out of them.

"We basically broke the cycle of a migrating population when we encaged Canada geese for some number of generations," said Gina Purtell, director of the Allens Pond Wildlife Sanctuary in Westport. "Now the geese we have don't have any inclination to migrate."

In 2005, there were 40,000 resident Canada geese in the state, according to the Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, a massive increase from 1970 when there were only 7,000 to 9,000 geese statewide. This population of resident geese is concentrated in the eastern part of the state.

To help control the geese population, the state introduced early and late hunting seasons in many parts of the state. These additional seasons are timed so that only the resident geese will be hunted.

Along SouthCoast, however, there is no late season. Climate changes have altered the patterns of the migratory geese, and geese that once flew as far south as North Carolina are now wintering in Southern New England. If hunters were allowed to hunt during a late season, they could inadvertently target migratory birds as well as the resident geese.

"Where these birds are exposed to hunting, we can control the numbers," Mr. Huesmann said. "Where they're not, we have problems."

However, wildlife advocates argue that hunting is neither effective nor humane.

"Our position is when those conflicts (between people and wildlife) do occur, they don't need to be resolved by hunting them," said Steve Rayshick, founder of Massachusetts Animal Rights Coalition. "Oftentimes, a town's first response is, 'Well, let's just shoot them.' But hunting doesn't really control them."

Egg addling, which is endorsed by many wildlife advocates, is another option for controlling the geese population. Addling is a way to prevent eggs from hatching by either coating them in corn oil or puncturing them. It does require a permit, but the process for obtaining this permit, which used to take up to 60 days, was simplified last year. Under the new process, most permits were sent out in under 72 hours.

But addling and other ways of preventing geese from reproducing, like OvoControl, an EPA-approved medication that acts as a contraceptive, are most effective when employed as a long-term strategy. In order to reduce the population, they must be applied over enough years that the adult geese start to die out without leaving behind younger geese to replace them.

"We're always looking for an easy cure-all," Mr. Huesmann said. "There isn't one."

What worked for Ms. Johnson and her neighbors was pure trickery. They installed a dozen coyote decoys around the circumference of the pond. The decoys, which are loosely attached to dowels stuck in the ground, swing just enough in the wind to convince the geese that they're alive and thus to be avoided.

Since the decoys were installed about a month ago, the geese problem around Sassaquin Pond has almost disappeared.

Until, Ms. Johnson noted, "they decide that the coyotes aren't going to eat them, that they're just a piece of wood."