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Canada geese can be a nuisance, but harassing them to leave an area may backfire.

These birds, which often take up residence in densely populated areas of North America and northern Europe, sometimes attack people during nesting season, leave droppings on playground equipment and, most seriously, pose a risk to air traffic at airports.

, then at the University of Illinois, and his colleagues tested whether harassing geese was an effective way to make them leave the area.

He fitted geese in Marquette Park near Midway Airport in Chicago with GPS trackers and activity monitors to record their behaviour, then he and his colleagues repeatedly chased them out of the park, by walking or driving towards them clacking wooden boards together. An earlier plan to use a remote-controlled vehicle that could travel over both land and water had to be abandoned due to technical difficulties.

The idea behind harassment is to force the geese to expend energy to escape a threatening situation, so that they decide the risk of staying in a particular location outweighs the benefits they get from being there, in the form of food or rest. But while the geese quickly left when approached, they soon came back. In fact, the geese returned to the park twice as quickly on days when they were harassed, compared with days when they left of their own accord.

鈥淭hey seemed to perceive that we weren鈥檛 a real threat, just a mild annoyance,鈥� says Askren.

Lynsey White, director of humane wildlife conflict resolution at the Humane Society of the United States, isn鈥檛 surprised that the harassment didn鈥檛 work, given the simple board-banging technique used.

鈥淚t鈥檚 fairly well established that the most effective techniques for aversively conditioning Canada geese are with specially trained goose dogs or with human-operated lasers,鈥� she says. Plus, geese in cities are used to both people and vehicles, so 鈥渋t鈥檚 not surprising that being chased away by people or vehicles was not an incredibly effective form of harassment鈥�.

Askren says the best way to control conflict with the geese is to modify the habitat to make it less hospitable, such as planting tall grass or shrubs along shorelines to make it harder for the geese to move between the water and the open lawns that they like to frequent.

While it is important to keep geese away from areas like airports for safety reasons, Askren notes that most of the conflict comes from the fact that humans have encroached on goose habitat, and they are just doing their best to exist in the world.

鈥淚t鈥檚 easy to vilify the geese, but we should also appreciate their ability to adapt and survive,鈥� he says.

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