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City Grapples With Goose Problem at Sunset Park

The City of Sturgeon Bay has applied for a grant to defray the cost of a goose roundup to reduce the resident Canada goose population within the city.

About 70 geese would be corralled during the summer of 2021 using the grant from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources’ (DNR) Urban Wildlife Damage Abatement and Control Division. If approved, the grant would pay 50 percent of the $7,500 budgeted. 

The last time a roundup was done within the city was 2018.

“In the two years since, the water levels have been so high that much of their nesting area has been under water,” said Mike Barker, Sturgeon Bay municipal services director. Decreasing water levels have uncovered more ground. 

Barker said it’s the resident Canada goose population that spends most of its life here that needs to be managed. When goose numbers swell as they’ve done this year, so does the excrement the geese leave on public facilities and beaches. 

“Not only is it disgusting,” Barker said, “it’s a safety concern. I don’t want people getting hurt.”

One goose can drop up to one and a half pounds of excrement a day. City workers then scrape, wash and blow the droppings off tennis courts, boat slips, docks and basketball courts all summer. Meanwhile, goose droppings pile up along local grassy areas and shorelines, sometimes causing beach closures due to E. coli contamination, Barker said. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, several germs found in goose scat can infect humans, including E. coli, salmonella, campylobacter and cryptosporidium.

Barker said the geese would be rounded up where their concentrations are highest – Sunset Park and a grassy strip along Memorial Drive – between mid-June and early July, when the birds are losing their primary flight feathers. The generally flightless birds would then be corralled with netted panel traps.

“There’s no such thing as goose-free. Everyone should learn to live with some geese.” 

— Dan Hirchert, State Director, Wisconsin USDA Wildlife Services

The adults would be taken to a USDA facility for processing, and the meat would be brought back to the Door County Food Pantry in Sturgeon Bay. Juveniles would be euthanized and used as a food source at raptor rehabilitation centers and other captive-wildlife operations, according to Dan Hirchert, state director for USDA Wildlife Services. 

“No one relishes having to manage the Canada goose population,” Hirchert said. “They’d just as soon not have to. But there gets to be a time when you have to decide that if you have green space and you have water, are you going to have people use it or geese? Because they can completely contaminate an area so it’s unusable.”

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is responsible for waterfowl management across the country. It gives natural-resources departments such as Wisconsin’s DNR statewide authority to issue the annual nuisance permits that allow for goose roundups. 

“The number of permits issued changes each year,” said DNR wildlife biologist Sarah Wyrick. “However, for the summer of 2020, 22 permits were issued to communities/organizations across the state.” 

Once those permits are issued, USDA Wildlife Services personnel work with permit holders such as the city to do the actual work of rounding up and transporting the geese – something they’ve been doing since the 1990s, Hirchert said. They also – and first – recommend various abatement techniques when feasible, such as implementing no-feeding ordinances, adding fencing and brushing corn oil on geese eggs to prevent hatching. 

The primary tool for managing the Canada goose population in Wisconsin is hunting. Roughly 145,000 Canada geese were harvested in Wisconsin in 2019 between a special early season and the regular season, according to the DNR’s harvest reports. But that doesn’t affect city birds. 

“A lot of times, these geese that like to be in municipal areas never leave,” Hirchert said. “They’re never exposed to hunting.”

Canada geese in residence in Sturgeon Bay and elsewhere in the northern states fly south once water sources freeze, but only as far south as they have to go. Today, Hirchert said, that generally means Illinois. 

Barker said the city’s goal is to control the population, not eliminate all the geese – which, Hirchert said, would not even be possible. 

“There’s no such thing as goose-free,” Hirchert said. “Everyone should learn to live with some geese.”

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