Photograph by Jennifer Silverberg
One glance at Dorene Olson’s Mazda, with two border collies in the hatch and a Scottish deerhound in the back, and the Canada geese who’ve been paddling in a pond at Bellefontaine Cemetery honk and fly away. Olson finally spots them over the rise, in a clearing hidden from the road. More precisely, she spots one black goose head sticking up above a crest of brown grass. It’s the tiniest curve of black—the chin-strap isn’t even visible—but Olson’s as perceptive as the animals she studies.
Her real love isn’t goose-herding; it’s translating animal behavior. An internationally certified animal-behavior consultant, she worked for more than a decade at the Tri-City Animal & Bird Clinic in Ellisville; she also teaches canine obedience and works with many rescue groups. Today, though, she’s here as the owner of WyndSong Border Collies and Canada Goose Management.
She walks quietly over the hill and starts stepping sideways, left arm extended, to steer about 60 grazing geese toward the pond. If they take refuge there, one of her border collies, Quill—already belted into a life jacket whose unnaturally bright orange alarms the geese—will follow them right in. Anna (the other border collie), Olson, and Gulliver (the deerhound) will work from shore.
The two border collies lower into a working crouch and stare at the geese with hypnotic intensity. Olson’s seen Quill, with her eerie amber eyes, stare a pair of geese right off their favorite roost.
“Uh-oh,” Olson murmurs, studying the sentinel geese who alert the flock to danger. “I don’t like the way their heads are facing. That’s the way they’ll head; that’s how livestock move.” She stands still. “They’re feeling the pressure, so I’m backing off a bit. That gander down there knows me, and he’s being flighty.” She raises both arms, and the geese waddle toward the water. She waits, cold fog swirling around her legs. Then she takes a step forward. Waits. Their call sounds shrill and hoarse, like cranky old women venting an ancient grievance.
“Vocal agitation, erect heads, and wing flapping are all signs of stress,” Olson says. “There—their heads are coming down. OK, I’m going to try to move them.”
Down at the pond, Quill plops into freezing-cold water without a second’s hesitation and starts paddling. “My village idiot,” Olson says fondly. “Always happy and always in trouble.” In point of fact, the dog’s flawlessly obedient; all three are. Gulliver automatically moves to Olson’s side as they take the position she calls the balance point, directly across the pond from Anna. This is the geometry of goose intimidation.
Olson never intended to use a Scottish deerhound in this work—she only trusts border collies, because they don’t snap at the animals they herd. “When we were starting up GeesePeace St. Louis, there was a company using Labradors. They just decimated all the ducks in that park—which were all dumped domestic ducks that could not fly.” Olson also does domestic waterfowl rescue work. “I hate Easter,” she mutters, cursing the families who buy their kids fuzzy widdle ducklings and then turn them loose in alarm when they outgrow the spare bathtub.
Border collies are her pick. They’re not hunting dogs eager to take fowl in their mouths; they’re herders, and they work by sight and signal, using strategy to move the animals.
But Gulliver, who came along as a puppy just for the ride, has turned out to have the most intimidating presence of all. “He looks like a great big, shaggy, wolf-like predator,” she says, “and they really respond to that.”
Without warning, Olson gives a trill: an upper-register buzz of B’s rounding into an R rolled at supersonic speed, with a stammer of P’s at the end. “It tells the geese I’m here and I mean business,” she explains, “and it also keeps the dogs enthused.” (They learn their herding skills on sheep, who tend not to fly away.)
“There was a time I moved about 3,000 geese up here,” Olson says. “The other day, we moved off a couple hundred. We’ve got two pairs that are here every year. They’re pair bonding now, because the weather’s all messed up.
“I despise roaring into their home with fearful predators and making them leave.” But she hates the alternative more: lethal culls, in which geese are rounded up on livestock trucks and shipped to a processing plant. “This is called ‘wildlife management,’” she says bitterly. “Supposedly, the meat is ‘donated’ to homeless pantries that don’t have ovens, plus nobody knows how to cook geese. They take the babies and throw them away at wildlife preserves, and if they manage to survive, they’re biologically programmed to go back to their place of birth… The roundups don’t accomplish anything.”
Tom Meister, wildlife damage biologist for the Missouri Department of Conservation, says “where they learn to fly is where they are imprinted to return,” and in most cases, the goslings, banded for tracking purposes, “go to refuges that already have geese established there.” Meister says he’s heard no complaints from food pantries. “And in my 10 years, we’ve probably had fewer than five roundups in St. Louis. A roundup is not the first choice: People have to show they’ve tried other methods.”
Sixty years ago, the Canada goose had nearly been hunted out of existence. The conservation department helped restore the population—and succeeded a little too well. Geese now swoop onto suburban ponds, ruffling the water, then waddle out, ungainly as pregnant ballerinas, and cover the manicured paths with green squiggles of poop. They’re so happy with their new weedless, predator-free habitats, they forget to migrate south. People pour chemicals on the grass, blow air horns, float plastic alligators, turn off the fountain, grid the pond with Mylar tape, add shrubs and tougher grass, build a wall around the water, and scream obscenities at the sky.
Finally, they get smart, and call in the dogs.
One of Olson’s first goose-herding clients was St. Louis Community College–Florissant Valley, where geese were hissing, spreading their wings, and charging at the students. Her roster also includes the University of Missouri–St. Louis, corporate office parks, suburban strip malls, and estates in Ladue and Frontenac.
St. Louis has achieved population stabilization, she says, meaning there are still problematic geese, but not as many babies. In nesting season (late March through late June), she hunts for nests, tests the eggs to make sure they don’t yet contain baby geese, and replaces them with fake wooden eggs, drilled with steel shot. (If the eggs already shelter fetuses, she returns them to the nest and helps the property owner deal with the resultant clutch.) “What we want to do is let the hens sit on the nest for two weeks,” she explains. “That will turn off their hormonal trigger to lay a new nest.”
Canada geese are majestic in the whoosh of their takeoffs, their tight V-formation flight, the 5-foot span of their wings, the 20-year span of their lives. When they pair off, it’s permanent: “We’ve seen only a few divorces,” Olson says. “When they get a mate, they’ll play a couple of years at housekeeping, build nests but not lay eggs until they’ve gotten the routine down.” Females lay five to seven eggs every spring, and the goslings tend to grow up, find a mate, and settle in the same area where they were born. Luckily, “they are incredibly intelligent,” Olson says, “and they can easily be trained to stay in a certain area.
“It just flabbergasts me that they arouse so much hatred.”
