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Feds help police the geese at Belmont Country Club
Behind the guarded gates of Belmont Country Club, just east of Leesburg, it's man against goose.With 200 to 300 geese calling the wetlands and fairways home, leaving feces behind and gobbling up grass and aquatic plants, Belmont called in the United States Department of Agriculture.
For the moment, the men are winning. And the sight of sedated Canadian geese being trucked off to have their necks wrung hasn't sat well with some neighbors.
"I think it's repulsive," said David Janiga, of Sterling. He was told about the goose program by a friend who witnessed the geese being fed sedative-laced bread.
Let the grass grow higher and thicker at the edges of the ponds, scare them with firecrackers, put down bad-tasting sprays, bring in the border collies to herd them away – all these things can be used before killing the geese, Janiga said.
Belmont Country Club General Manager Jim Karafa agreed. He's been on the job in the Toll Brothers community and golf course for three years, and the problems with geese began at least two years before that.
"We've gone through all that stuff," Karafa said. "But we just chased them from pond to pond." The property, south of Route 7 in the Ashburn area, has five or six large storm-water retention ponds and a federally monitored wetlands mitigation area.
"If you have water and you have grass, you're going to have geese," said Dage Blixt, supervisory wildlife biologist with the USDA Wildlife Services who for the last year and a half has led the campaign to get the geese to go elsewhere and to thin their ranks.
A majority of Dage's work is "habitat modification" (make the environment less goose-friendly), "avoidance" (make the area noisy or threatening so the geese go away) and about 8 percent of the time, he kills the geese.
Blixt said that Belmont had the "geese police," as the trained border collies are known, on the job for two years. The geese simply learned to go away for a while and to come back when the dogs moved on.
Dogs are great, Blixt said, but "dogs alone over time will fail. The key is an integrated approach."
The Wildlife Services' approach includes lasers [harassment lights], flares, paint-ball guns, any type of physical harassment [dogs] pyrotechnics and egg addling.
Egg addling – coating the eggs in a nest with corn oil – prevents the eggs from hatching, but since they are still in the nest, the geese continue tending them. If the eggs are eaten by a predator or destroyed, the geese lay another clutch.
"Most of what we do is harassment and dispersal, Blixt said. "We do incorporate lethal removal. It's much more of a lesson to them."
Janiga isn't convinced. He loves geese, he said, and "all they are basically doing is pooing. Those pampered golfers don't want to get their shoes dirty."
Shoot one goose, Blixt said, and the next time he sets off firecrackers, the survivors pay attention.
When geese are moulting in the early summer and can't fly, they can be herded into enclosures and removed from the area. Those geese are euthanized and the carcases are given to food banks.
If a cluster, five to 15 of the geese, becomes habituated to everything else – the firecrackers, the dogs, the lights – it will be fed bread or corn laced with alpha chlorolose. The sedated geese are then euthanized and buried. They cannot be used for human consumption with the chemical in their systems, Blixt said.
Karafa said that the geese are more than a nuisance to the golfers or a contamination hazard. They devour the vegetation in the wetlands.
"The Corps [of Engineers] just analyzed all our wetlands and made several recommendations. One was to control the goose population."
Toll Brothers has paid anywhere from $15,000 to $20,000 a year for help from Wildlife Services, Karafa said. The government charges for manpower, travel, supplies and equipment.
Belmont, for the moment, seems to be goose-free. Karafa has no doubt they'll be back. Nearly 1.3 million make their home in the Atlantic Flyway -- the East Coast of the U.S. from Maine to Florida.
Contact the reporter at ssollinger@timespapers.com
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