Politics & Government

This Year, Prospect Park's Geese are Safe

The city has announced that it will not kill the park's Canada Geese this summer.

The city has confirmed that at least this year, it has no plans to come after Prospect Park’s Canada Geese.

“The comprehensive effort to reduce the risk that Canada Geese pose to the flying public is clearly working,” said DEP Spokesperson Farrell Sklerov. “This year’s surveys indicate that the population of resident Canada geese has been cut in half within seven miles of city airports since just last year.”

Sklerov said that Prospect Park’s goose population has been so significantly reduced that the city felt no need for “culling” in Prospect Park this year.

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Local nature lovers and activists had organized in the past few weeks in hopes of preventing the repetition of last summer’s middle of the night goose eradication, in which the United States Department of Agriculture rounded up and gassed nearly 400 park geese.

Anticipating that the USDA might come back this year for the park’s remaining 26 geese before the expiration of the city’s kill contract with the agency on June 30, one group of geese enthusiasts even started a late-night “” to keep an eye on the geese in the park’s off house.

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If the USDA arrived, the Goose Watch planned to send out a mass text message and phone call to its army of supporters, who would then descend noisily upon the park in hopes of scaring off the geese.

But this year, Prospect Park’s geese will be spared.

In addition to the success of last year’s midnight geese gassing, Skerlov said that some of the Prospect Park Alliance’s population control methods—which include oiling eggs and using border collies to scare geese away—appear to have been effective.

“We hope they will continue these efforts,” he added, “especially no-feeding policies.”

Geese elsewhere in the city, though, won’t be so lucky—between 700 and 800 geese are expected to be killed in and round the city in the coming weeks, though the DEP would not release specifics as to where.

Activists were excited by the news, though some had been skeptical that the USDA would bother coming for just over two dozen geese in the first place.

“Over the past year, (we) have been working for transparency concerning our urban park wildlife so that the USDA could not justify coming to Prospect Park in 2011,” said Anne-Katrin Titze, a New York State-licensed wildlife rehabilitator and park geese activist. “We believe that by opening the door of communication and by building trust, so much more can be accomplished.”


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