Geese Prevention

Do you have geese preventing you from having that perfectly manicured lawn you’ve always seen in Home & Garden magazines?   Well, I’m here to give you a few tips on how to prevent and control the geese that continue to pester you on a yearly basis.  First of all, the best and most effective results can be attained by using a combination of several of these tactics, switching them from time to time to prevent the geese from becoming immune to any one of these particular methods. 

There are many different tactics you can use to eliminate geese populations in a given area, I’ll start off with the most obvious one: elimination of feeding.  I know some people love to have bird feeders in their lawns, but the truth is this is seen as a “hand-out” to the local geese, & this leads to fat, lazy, aggressive geese in your backyard.  So, eliminate the feeders & you eliminate the easy source of food for the geese.  The next most prominent method is hunting, I am aware that some people view hunting as an unethical action that should be avoided at all costs.  But this isn’t always true, especially in the case of geese, if the geese over populate they can actually harm the ecosystem.  So, if hunters help to control the geese populations the ecosystem will likely even itself out over time.

 Now we get to talk about two different types of scare devices.  The first type is an audio scare device, these include: shell crackers, bird bangers, screamers, rockets, bird alarms, distress cries, motion detector accessories, and electronic noise systems.  The second type is a visual scare device, these include: bird scare balloons, mylar scare tape, and plastic flags.  Another very popular and effective means of scaring the geese away is through the use of a dog, dogs chase geese off of the property, usually keeping the geese away for as long as the dog is around.  And, if any of you readers wish to keep these water fowl from eating your lawn you can try sprinkling repellant on your grass, or planting a less desirable variety of grass, like fescue, in place of blue grass.  Finally, barrier fencing is a fast, effective way to keep any flightless geese out of your water source.  These can be constructed out of: plastic snow fence, chain link, woven wire, string, mylar tape, or chicken wire. 

In conclusion, allowing geese to take over your pond can cause major problems for the future health of your pond.  Geese produce a significant amount of waste that will accumulate on the pond floor and feed algae and weed growth.  If you do have organic material that has sunk to the bottom of your pond, the product I would highly recommend you use is Natural Pond Cleaner.  This is a beneficial bacterium that dissolves debris and cleans up residue that adheres to the bottom of your aquatic environment.  For severe algae growth use Sanco's Crystal Plex algae control.   For specific prevention on a particular pond size, please refer to the table displayed below.  If you have any other questions about our products, weeds, or pests please contact our helpful staff.

 Table 1: refereced from Michigan DNR website,