After nixing a plan three years ago to euthanize a number of the geese plaguing Foster City, the town is going to pay a contractor to shoo off the pesky birds.

The Peninsula city of Foster City has become a favorite home of Canada geese, who are great appreciators well maintained parks and lawns — they are herbivores, and grass is a main component of their diet. Back in 2022, Foster City made headlines with a plan to cull or euthanize some 100 Canada geese, given that the town's parks have been overrun with several hundred of the birds and the population has grown significantly in recent years, and given the massive amount of goose poop around town that requires cleaning.

That plan was abandoned after an outcry from some residents and animal rights activists. But three years on, the problem with the geese and their poop remains, and as the Chronicle reports, residents with children say they're afraid of using the town's 24 parks — in addition to the poop issue, the geese have also been known to be aggressive with dogs and childrens when they are nesting. And the Canada goose population now numbers between 300 and 400 in Foster City.

City leaders have already tried several non-lethal methods of "hazing" or scaring off the birds, including fogging, and strobe lights — the latter apparently bothered the residents more than the geese. And a contractor already goes around to goose nests and "addles" the eggs, shaking them to essentially render the embryos nonviable.

It doesn't help that "resident" geese, as they're called when they don't migrate for part of the year, tend to reproduce more than migratory birds.

Now, the city council has approved a $400,000 contract with a company that specializes in managing wildlife, and the company is going to attempt to shoo the geese out of seven "high-impact" parks in Foster City, through various means. Per the contract, the company, Wildlife Innovations, will use "lasers, remote-controlled devices, drones, boats and foggers" to haze the birds, and they also may use dogs as well. They also plan to recommend modifications to the park, including turf grass alternatives that will reduce the geese's food source, and fencing.

The result likely being that the birds will just relocate to other parks, or nearby towns — Redwood City, Belmont, and San Mateo all have their own Canada goose populations.

"I’d hate for us to pour this kind of money into this program that we’re executing in a silo all by ourselves,” said Foster City Vice Mayor Art Kiesel, per the San Mateo Daily Journal. "If all the [cities’ geese populations] are down, we’re doing great. If we’re down, and the other three are up, that’s a different ballgame."

Foster City, which has a population of around 34,000 people, is located on the bayfront east of San Mateo. The master-planned city was constructed in the 1960s on marshland, using engineered landfill, around a central lagoon over which there are seven bridges, and the town boasts 160 acres of open space.

"When humans decide, 'Let’s have a park with grass surrounding it,' you’ve created the most perfect environment for those geese," says Melanie Weaver, an environmental scientist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s waterfowl unit, speaking to the Chronicle. She says the amount of poop they produce is an unfortunate problem, because otherwise, "they are really cool animals."

Photo by Anastasiya Delenka