County Canadian Geese Control Policies Working

County officials have taken on the Canada geese population head on, but geese control in Verona Park has had the most encouraging results thus far, officials said recently.

The program has been so successful, Del DeMaio, a West Orange volunteer said, there have not been any births in Verona Park in the last three years.

“Were not trying to kill off the population though,” DeMaio said. “These geese were bred here in the 60s for hunting.”

On March 14, residents from Verona and surrounding towns attended an information training session on how to control this man-made goose population at the Verona Park boathouse that was led by DeMaio and Tara Casella, from the Essex County Department of Parks.

“The geese that are born here are stuck here,” DeMaio said, explaining the geese aren’t meant to be here.

“They have never known how to migrate back to Canada because they weren’t born there,” he said. Geese always return to where they were born to nest. That is why they keep coming back here. We are only interfering now because it was already interfered with.”

“Geese will always come here because we have open grass fields and bodies of water,” Casella said, responding to a participants question if this would kill off the geese population.

The geese that will come here will migrate to Canada and nest there, they explained.

So the county has adopted a process from Geese Peace on how on humanely control the population.

The process is to find the nest, float test the eggs to find the age and then coat the egg with corn oil so the eggs don’t hatch.

Float testing involves seeing if the eggs sink in a bucket of water. If they do, it is considered humane to coat them with oil because they aren’t embryos yet. The oiling process takes a few minutes, so Casella suggested going with groups of two to three.

Oiling involves marking an egg with an X with a Sharpie, float testing the egg then drying it before putting oil on it.

A flag must be put up about 10 feet from the nest marking it with a number showing how many eggs were found. Everything must be documented.

“We’ve found 16 eggs in one nest,” Brickens said, “and that took us awhile.”

Some areas use dogs to scare the geese away, like at Montclair State University, where the birds were near the Children’s Care Center on Clove Road. But that only causes the birds to move to other places where they would never have gone to nest before.

“I found a nest at Short Hills mall one year that was right outside of an entrance,” DeMaio said.

The problem is the geese are very territorial and look at anyone going near the nest as predators. The suggested way to get the geese away without hurting them is using umbrellas to push them back. That doesn’t always work though.

“A lady got hit in the face the other day,” said Robert Brickens who has done this for three years working for Bloomfield’s department of public works. The session included two public works employees and two Bloomfield volunteers.

“We trained up in Whippany and they showed a few training videos and they didn’t show any of what we’ve seen in the videos,” Brickens said, claiming the Bloomfield geese are the most hostile.

Casella said she or DeMaio would do training based on request, but the process will start in the next two weeks. 

To volunteer or if someone has geese nesting on their property, call (973) 228-8776.