Urbandale Council: Sic Dogs on the Geese

The rest of October will be a rough month for the geese at Lakeview Park.

The on Tuesday night approved a request from Parks Director Jan Herke to haze the geese.

"It doesn't hurt the geese, but it puts a level of fear into the geese so they move somewhere else," she said.

The council unanimously approved an ordinance that allows for an exception to the ordinance prohibiting dogs running at-large in the city. 

Herke said the city will try an experiment by having the Urbandale Golf and Country Club groundskeeper use two trained Labrador retrievers to chase the geese at the park for the next month. The technique worked well in getting geese to leave the golf club's pond.

She said the dogs could be turned loose for 45 minutes at a time as often as eight times a week.

Herke said the problem has been ongoing for several years with her department receiving numerous complaints about the geese at the park. The problem diminished last year when the park's pond was drained and dredged.

With the water gone, the geese were gone. But now the pond has been refilled and the geese are back.

"About 2 p.m. today, there were 75 to 100 geese" in the 23.7 acre park, Herke said.

She said her department has put up signs warning park users not to feed the ducks or the geese. 

Parks officials already had planned to plant some pockets of native grasses and wildflowers on the northwest side of the lake in an effort to reduce the algae in the pond. Those areas also will make the geese nervous because they can harbor predators, she said.

If we drive them off this pond, where are they going to show up next?" asked Councilman Ron Pogge. "I assume we're not driving them to Canada."

"If they relocate to water to the west, I'd be all in favor of allowing some hunting of geese," he said.

Herke said there will be a public meeting at the park at 5:30 p.m., Thursday. An Iowa State University expert will be there to talk about the park's ecosystem.