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Town oils eggs to rid lake of geese

To reduce bird droppings on shoreline, Washington Grove prevents goose eggs from hatching with addling and umbrellas

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

It took shape with the help of several umbrellas and some food-grade corn oil, but one way or another, residents of Washington Grove decided they’d try this year to avoid letting bird droppings splatter upon an otherwise decent summer.

Moved by fecal-laden memories of when Canada geese two years ago raised goslings that peppered the shores of the town’s Maple Lake, making for icky beach conditions, residents early this month took pre-emptive action to stop the droppings before they start by removing their sole source: more geese.

In a process known as addling, volunteers trekked to the lake, where geese were defending a new nest, chased the birds away using umbrellas to startle them and fend off their resistance, and coated the eggs in corn oil to cut off their oxygen supply and prevent the embryos’ development.

Experts liken the process to a form of birth control to help control geese populations short of slaughtering living birds, while the small, Gaithersburg-area town hopes it will help strike a balance between the birds’ right to raise a family and residents’ right to enjoy droppings-free beaches.

‘‘If you just chase them off and get rid of the geese, they often come back,” Washington Grove Mayor John Compton said. ‘‘The idea is to get rid of them so that they will really leave.”

Canada geese, often seen flying in ‘‘V” shapes while migrating, were once rare due to over-hunting, but federal and state breeding and relocation projects in the 1950s and 1960s helped replenish the population, which settled comfortably into rapidly developing suburbia, experts say.

Ann Philips, a 15-year town resident, led the volunteers who ‘‘oiled” the eggs at Maple Lake April 2 and April 9, and so far, she says, the method, in which the oil stops oxygen from passing through the shell and allowing an embryo to grow, seems to have worked.

‘‘We were told that after four weeks, when the eggs don’t hatch, they’d leave the area,” Philips said, adding that they last checked the area April 15 and found that someone had thrown the nest into the lake. ‘‘But the geese did appear to leave.”

To proceed with the effort, the town got a permit from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, required for anyone to addle eggs, and the volunteers got training from Maggie Brasted, director of urban wildlife conflict resolution for the Washington, D.C.-based Humane Society of the United States.

Brasted says addling — whose other forms include egg replacement, nest destruction and the more-difficult piercing and shaking — is more humane than killing live birds (mass gassing and slaughtering can be done by government authorities or private businesses). But, she said, habitat change is needed for long-term population control.

‘‘When you look around the typical suburban development,” Brasted said, ‘‘we have built goose nirvana.”

Philips, a retired therapist, said the hardest part was getting past the geese, particularly the gander, which attacked and broke some of the umbrellas donated to them by the national Humane Society.

That group suggests suddenly opening an umbrella near the birds can both startle them into moving away and protect people from their flapping wings and other defensive measures.

‘‘It’s surprisingly labor-intensive,” Philips says, ‘‘when you have two geese who are flying at you.”