QUECHEE — The dozens of Canada geese who live most of the year on and around the Quechee Club’s Lakeland golf course and Lake Pinneo received at least a temporary reprieve from a plan to round up and shoot more than half of them.
“We postponed the hunt and we’re evaluating all of our population control options,” Quechee Club property manager said Ken Lallier said Tuesday afternoon. “We’ve looked at a variety of options and we’re going to look at all of them again.”
The postponement follows an outcry from some Quechee Lakes landowners and other Upper Valley residents wanting to protect the geese. The response ranged from emails and social-media appeals to direct phone calls to club leadership and to trustees on the board of the Quechee Lakes Landowners Association, most of them urging the club to try alternative approaches such as harassing the birds with herding dogs and letting grass grow higher around ponds and the Ottauquechee River to deter geese from straying onto greens and fairways.
But Vermont wildlife officials said the proposed hunt as part of the resident goose hunting season was a sound management practice and done at other golf courses in the state.
“I’d say it’s very important for us to manage resident goose populations, both for environmental health and sustainability of the population and for impacts on people,” said Vermont Fish and Wildlife Commissioner Louis Porter.
Mark Scott, the director of wildlife for the department, said problems from an uncontrolled resident goose population range from E. coli in waterways from goose droppings to overgrazing, with farmers also complaining about the effect on alfalfa.
“They are grazers,” Scott said of the geese. “They can have a huge impact on the vegetation.” Geese can also become “quite aggressive,” especially in protecting their nests, he said.
Among the early protesters of the planned hunt was longtime landowner Maureen Bacon, who learned about the hunt from a notice Lallier posted last week in the Quechee Lakes newsletter.
“This makes my heart feel good,” Bacon said upon learning of the postponement. “I woke up this morning wondering how many geese were killed today. I’m sure they had enough people who were upset about it speak up.
“Once (Quechee Lakes officials) make a decision, they don’t usually change their minds about something.”
Lallier would not rule out the possibility of a hunt still being held this month before the end of the resident goose-hunting season.
Landowners in Vermont are legally permitted to cull so-called “resident” flocks between Sept. 1 and 25, at a bag limit of eight geese per licensed hunter, before the wilder flocks of migratory Canada geese typically start arriving, state wildlife officials said. (The bag limit for migratory geese is two).
Lallier said that “since Vermont has had a resident goose-hunting season, we have been doing some control activity… We have done it the past.”
In his notice in the newsletter, Lallier wrote that the club aimed to “cull the resident population before the migratory birds start arriving in early October. Left unmanaged, these resident birds will increase in number and become a nuisance and a health hazard with their droppings on the courses and Lake Pinneo beach. The resident birds are the ones that will return next season to fledge their young, and that is why it is extremely important to maintain some control over the resident flock numbers.”
Among area residents who read news reports of the hunt, Judith Bevins, who lives on a Quechee Lakes property more than a mile from the golf course, said that she emailed Lallier, interim club general manager John Erickson and the club’s marketing department.
“I suggested figuring out a long-range, humane plan,” Bevins said. “Many of the animals here take care of themselves. There are predators, and the population seems to control itself pretty well.”
Lallier estimated the population of resident geese at “about 80,” and his notice to club members last week said the goal was to cull the number to around 30.
The more managing, by any means necessary including gunfire, the better, in the eyes of White River Junction resident Betsy Bowse.
“These nasty birds may be picturesque, but they contaminate land and water wherever they go,” Bowse wrote during an exchange of emails over the holiday weekend. “They completely fouled a beautiful lake and fishing hole in Michigan, where my late husband and I used to go camping and fishing.
“I’d tell these hunters to fire away!”
Porter, the Fish and Wildlife commissioner, said waterfowl hunters are required to use nontoxic shot in Vermont and that most of the geese that might be shot on the golf course would turn into somebody’s meal.
“I would expect that these geese would wind up on the table,” Porter said.
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews. com and at 603-727-3304.