Written By: Dr. Rob Fergus/ Resident Absolute Bird Control Ornithologist

Canada Geese are spectacular and intelligent birds.  But when they get in your space they can be big, noisy, and messy.  Dealing with nuisance geese involves knowing a bit about their biology and lifestyle, figuring out exactly what they are doing on your property, and then taking appropriate actions.

Geese generally cause two main problems—making a mess, and chasing people.  They mostly make messes when they are feeding and loafing.  Geese mostly chase people when they are nesting.  So depending on your problem with geese, you need to address what is attracting them—which is probably either food or safety (for loafing or nesting).

Feeding
Basically a nice lawn is an open invitation to geese!  They munch on the grass and basically just hang out in the open where they can keep an eye out for approaching dangers.  There are two main ways to deal with this—one is to get rid of the lawn.  The other is to make the lawn less tasty.  The first solution may seem drastic, but is the most effective.  You almost never see flocks of geese wandering around in the woods—so if it is at all possible to replace your lawn with native bushes, shrubs, and trees, that will be the most effective way to get them to move elsewhere.  If that isn’t an option, it may be possible to get the geese to move on by making your grass taste bad to the geese using Migrate Goose Repellent a non-toxic grape extract,  Methyl Anthranilate, that people use as an artificial grape flavor in foods, but geese find offensive.

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Written By: Dr. Rob Fergus

Almost every inquiry I get about bird problems hides an underlying question of “why the heck is that bird doing this crazy thing?”  While the inner workings of a bird mind may be beyond the realm of this article, we can better understand birds and why they do what they do when we start to look at what is important to them.

Bird Needs
Just like humans, birds have needs.  On a regular basis they need food, water, sleep, and safety.  Seasonally they may be driven to attract or select a mate, build a nest, defend a territory, and raise their young.  While birds aren’t sitting around introspectively making wish lists, they do have hormones driving them to satisfy these basic needs.  So in some sense we can say that the birds “want” to satisfy these needs.  Whenever you are dealing with a bird, you are dealing with an animal specifically designed to fulfill certain needs.  Each species has its own set of needs and unique ways of satisfying those needs.   Each individual bird will satisfy those needs within whatever range of behavior is available to it and in response to its current circumstances.

Food
Birds have to eat.  No food, no bird.  What a bird eats and how it finds its food is species specific, and is sometimes the source of conflict with humans.  Fruit-eating birds become pests when they eat the fruit we want.  Herons become pests when they gulp down our favorite koi in our backyard pond.  But knowing what a bird eats and how it gets its food can help us thwart the hungry birds.  Nets can keep birds from reaching those blueberries in your garden.  Deep ponds can help the fish stay out of reach of a hungry heron.  Birds are very motivated by food, since it is such a basic need.  So any time you have a pest bird that is motivated by food, you probably have to create some kind of barrier that makes it physically impossible to get the food.  Other bird deterrents—like scary decoys or other menacing visual displays—may not actually distract a bird that is really hungry!
 

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Written By: Dr. Rob Fergus

In Robert McCloskey’s children’s book Make Way for Ducklings, Mallard ducks raise a family in a Boston city park and stop traffic on their foray out into the larger community.  While the children’s story ends happily, real life duck stories sometimes end with Mallards or Muscovy Ducks becoming something of a nuisance.  In yards, nesting ducks may make a mess on the lawn or in swimming pools.  On properties with water frontage, ducks may loaf and make a mess on docks or boats. Unfortunately in real life it isn’t always easy or even feasible to make way for ducklings!

So what do you do when a duck moves in uninvited?  First realize that you actually did invite the duck—there is something about your yard that attracted the duck in the first place.  Maybe it was the swimming pool, maybe it was a low bush for it to build a nest under, or just a place to climb out of the water and rest.  So pay attention to what the ducks are doing in your yard and try to identify why it was attracted to your yard in the first place.  Once you figure out what the duck is attracted to, you can solve the problem by making your yard less appealing to the ducks.

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In a memorable scene from the 2009 Sandra Bullock film The Proposal, an eagle attempts to carry off a Kevin, a small American Eskimo Dog while an astonished Sandra Bullock looks on (watch the scene online here.)  This scenario sends chills through the hearts of small dog owners, who may become nervous when they notice large hawks hanging out in their neighborhood. 

First the good news.  In general, a hawk or even an eagle will not attack an animal as large as even a small dog unless there is nothing else for it to eat, and even then it would be very unusual.  Episodes like that depicted in The Proposal are actually so rare as to be almost unheard of, and are deemed by Snopes [link to http://www.snopes.com/critters/mishaps/dognap.asp] to reside mostly in the realm of urban legend. 

Bald Eagles do not usually hunt for mammals, and Golden Eagles which regularly do hunt mammals live in mostly rural areas of the western states and avoid residential areas.  Red-tailed Hawks are the most common large hawk across most of North America, and they are frequently found in residential neighborhoods with large open areas.  While Red-tailed Hawks may look big, they only weigh an average of 2.3 (males) to 2.7 (females) pounds.  The good news is that hawks usually only hunt for animals that weigh less than they do—which are usually small mammals (squirrel sized or smaller) and birds.  In a comprehensive review of Red-tailed Hawk food habits, by far the largest food animal reported was a 4.4 pound jackrabbit.  These hawks usually do not carry away their larger prey, but kill and eat them on the ground.  But since hawks rarely attack anything that weighs more than they do, most dogs (and large cats) will be safe from being attacked by a hawk, let alone carried off through the air.

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