Foster City will take another go at trying to manage its goose population
When Angela Stucker takes a gander at a flock of geese with her kids in Foster City, she sees them as her neighbors.
"Oh, they're so cute," she said. "I realized that they're really cool if you get to know them."
She embraces their abundant existence and everything that comes with it. To her, they're an important part of the Foster City community.
But many of her neighbors have a problem with one part of the geese's existence: the droppings they leave behind.
"It's feces. It's poop. It's in our pathways, it's in our parks, it's in our sports fields, it's obviously in our lagoon, which is impacting the water quality," said Derek Schweigart, the Foster City Parks & Recreation Director.
Schweigart said city leaders have spent years trying to figure out how to manage the large goose population in an effort to reduce the goose poop in the community.
"We've been doing population counts for a little over seven years. It can range anywhere from 300-400 geese in our peak part of the season," he said. "We have water quality issues which have been totally directed to the geese."
In the past, city leaders said strategies like fogging, egg addling, lasers, and more, just didn't work.
"In isolation, they're not very effective. The geese adapt very quickly," he said.
A previous iteration of the City Council even took a step to acquire federal permits to kill 100 of the geese. But after public outcry, they backed off and began the process of formulating a mitigation plan.
Schweigart said the city now has a plan that he thinks will finally work for the problem and for the bulk of the community.
"It is focused on habitat modification, which is removing food sources from the geese and changing and adapting the environment that is very attractive to them here in Foster City. That's a long-term solution. In the meantime, we are going to condition the geese to not be here in Foster City and make this a less attractive space for them," he said.
The strategy will involve drones, dogs, lasers, and more – many of the tools they've employed in the past. Only this time, Schweigart says they'll be used in tandem with one another. The price tag? Around $400,000.
"It's one thing to come out and say we tried this activity, we tried this mitigation measure – we did not try them collectively," he said. "The geese are here. They're residents. However, our goal is to reduce the amount of conflict there is between humans and geese."
Stucker, however, is skeptical it will amount to change and questions the price tag.
"I just don't think that they're going to go away. They've been here forever," she said. "We have to accept nature for all it is, and this is what comes along with it."
Phyllis Macarthur, who has lived in Foster City for 25 years, seconded that opinion and thinks the focus should be on cleanup efforts instead.
"Let it go. Let them live. Let's clean up the goose poop," she said.
Schweigart believes this strategy will stick and calls it the best step the city has taken towards addressing the problem.
"I really do think that this is going to be a boilerplate for a number of agencies, especially those who are our closest neighbors because those geese are going to go somewhere, they're going to leave Foster City, but they're not leaving the Bay Area," he said. "It's a one-year out of three-year pilot. We will be evaluating along the way to see whether or not its effective at essentially, moving the geese."