Mississauga geese give authorities the slip; others bound for Aylmer not so lucky
Waterfront municipalities across Ontario launch dawn raids to round up problem geese from park lands

Thestar.com
June 29, 2014
By Todd Coyne

It was some time in the night, hours before the authorities swooped in, that a flock of Mississauga’s most wanted just up and flew the coop.

Maybe it was the pre-dawn arrival of the poultry truck that tipped them off, or maybe a ‘little bird’ told them. What’s clear is that the hundreds of problem geese, whose residence in the lagoon of Lake Promenade Park has for weeks been a source of headaches for parks staff and odours a-fowl for beach-goers, were nowhere to be seen Wednesday morning when the dragnet came down.

“I saw several hundred of them in the lagoon just yesterday,” said a parks official on the shore who asked not to be named. “There was a storm here last night and they may have taken to deep water.”

Like many waterfront municipalities in Ontario this week, Mississauga and Oakville are rounding up large swaths of their nuisance-goose populations to send to the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resource’s wildlife management area in Aylmer.

It’s moulting season, which means geese do little else besides shed last year’s feathers, chew up lawns and defecate.

“It’s sort of like a buffet for them,” said Mississauga parks manager Andrew Wickens as he surveyed the mess at Lakefront Promenade Park. “With high populations they’ll just crop the grass down to nothing. We lose the turf and then what comes out the other end is also an issue.”

Luckily for parks officials, moulting season also means the birds are rendered flightless for approximately six weeks. And that, at least theoretically, should make them a lot easier to catch.

It’s 6 a.m. and walkie-talkies crackle with life across the bay. Workers in powerboats relay their movements to shore as they close in on the lagoon from the east and west in a classic pincer maneuver. A sweep of the marina turns up nothing; the yacht club is quiet.

Men on the shore are driving fence posts for a temporary kettling pen at the back of the 18-wheeler when a low honking rises up from the mouth of the lagoon. It’s not the hundreds missing from the night before, but a boat has chased a sizeable flock from near the mouth of the Credit River into the entrance of the lagoon. Two more boats double back and seal off the bay.

It’s game over for these wild game.

Shore crews get to work with loud voices and outstretched arms, moving the pinwheel of geese clockwise along the shoreline as the boaters slap their oars on the water to keep the birds from the middle of the bay. Soon, there’s nowhere else to go but into the holding pen, up the goose ramp and into the truck’s steel cargo cage.

“One-hundred, seventy-six,” is the final tally for the lagoon, according to Frank Buckley, parks manager for Mississauga’s south region, arriving on scene. It’s not quite the quarry of would-be jailbirds some in the parks department were hoping to send up the river, but this is just the first stop of the morning.

“We cannot have a hiccup in this process,” Buckley said, clutching an Environment Canada warrant for 1,050 birds and heading to the next location. “Otherwise we lose the momentum.”

By day’s end, parks staff will have nabbed little more than half that - 564 geese in total.