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Fed up with the swarms of Canada geese
that appear to enjoy nothing more than congregating on Denville parks and
fields, the township is now fighting fowl with faux.
More than a dozen plywood dogs are standing guard over the
town's recreation areas and officials hope the cut-out figures will
frighten geese enough to stay away. So far, Denville officials say, their
canine incarnation of the scarecrow has been effective.
"We put them up (last week) Monday or Tuesday, and we
haven't seen a goose on the field since," said Joe Lowell, Denville's
director of public works. "We got them on just about all our fields,
probably a dozen of them or so."
Denville, like towns all over the state, has tried an
assortment of techniques - from lethal roundups to egg-addling - to reduce
their geese population and the
massive amount of droppings they leave that pollute ponds and foul lawns.
Now, they are hoping their lowtech, virtually cost-free (a
sheet of quarter-inch thick plywood runs about $10 and yields about four
dogs, Lowell said) concept might finally do the trick.
The cut-out tactic has been used across the country, on golf
courses to office complexes and even residential yards, to varying degrees
of victory. But some experts say any initial success is temporary and
misleading.
"Doesn't work," said David Feld, national program
director for the Falls Church, Va. organization GeesePeace,
which promotes humane geese management methods. "They don't see it as
a dog," he said. "They see it as something there that wasn't
there before, makes them a little nervous, but they'll be back."
Linda Henderson, who runs a GeesePeace management program at
Avon-by-the-Sea in Monmouth County, said that several residents in her
town had tried the cut-out dogs, but they didn't work. "The geese are
smart and they soon realize that the cardboard dog isn't really a
predator," she said.
Instead of the pretenders, Avon uses the real thing. With one
trained border collie and two dog handlers, the dog polices seven bodies
of water, she said. He goes from place to place either in a jeep or in a
boat.
People have long used scare tactics, like propane exploders
and banging sounds, to keep the birds at bay, said Jennifer Lapis of the
U.S. Division of Fish & Wildlife, which oversees management of the
Canada geese.
But birds to tend to get used to the stimuli, she added.
"Oftentimes, you see scarecrows in the field and there are crows all
over it:" At the same time, she said,
"people can try different things and use what works."
It remains to be seen how the dogs fare in Denville. The idea
came from parks supervisor Bill Kenny, who saw similar cutouts at an
office complex on Route 10. He and public works employee Robin Cook then
traced the dogs onto plywood, cut them out and painted them black.
They are also experimenting with modifying the dogs a bit,
maybe putting hinges on the tails to make them appear more lifelike.
They enjoyed the fruits of their labor as soon as the dogs
went down in the soil. "We had about eight geese come flying in,. . .
they saw the dogs and headed out towards Rockaway," Kenny said.
The dogs do seem to attract other pests, however - not three
hours after they were put out last week, a local teenager was spotted
trying to walk off with one. Of the 16 made in the first batch, two are
already missing, Kenny said. |
