Meet Samantha the Dog: Prospect Park's Goose Hunter

If the government wants to kill your geese, who you gonna call? If you're Prospect Park, the answer is a firm called Goose Busters.

Phil Graziano formed it 15 years ago, when geese began desecrating the sports fields at his sons’ school in New Jersey.

"They were afraid because the students were playing on the fields, and they were covered with goose poop that the parents would look for other places to educate their children," he said.

Now, Goose Busters works for more than 50 companies, counties and municipalities in a half-dozen different states. This week in Prospect Park Graziano, another colleague and Samantha the black, white and brown border collie started to get the lay of the land. They're trying to harass the geese into leaving the park.

"Mostly, it’s just chasing them," Graziano said."Occasionally in a nesting situation, a dog will get in an altercation with a goose, and it’ll hold it. But in most cases they see the dog, they don’t want to be anywhere near it."

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, with the city's blessing, last year killed hundreds of geese in Prospect Park. It was part of a plan to clear as many of them as possible within a seven-mile radius of the city's airports. The killing troubled many local residents, but the city and the USDA said it’s a necessary — and ongoing — precaution to keep the birds out of jet engines.

The Parks Department and the Prospect Park Alliance hope a number of non-lethal steps this year will drive the birds away. They've posted signs discouraging feeding the geese; oiled the eggs in nests so they can’t hatch and multiply; and hired Goose Busters at $725 a week for eight weeks, to see how it goes. Spring is the time to do bring in the dogs, said Anne Wong, the park's director of landscape management.

"Goose culling usually takes place during the molt season, because birds can’t fly then," she said. "So, we’re bringing in the border collies now just to try to make this place inhospitable to geese before the molt so we don’t have a large population of geese over the summer."

Photo: (Fred Mogul/WNYC)

One Goose Buster paddles around the Prospect Park lake in a kayak to harass the geese in the water. Phil Graziano and Samantha, the border collie, work the shore. The breed has legendary focus, but Samantha is a little distracted today.

"Samantha, come on, pay attention," said Graziano, as Samantha sniffs around but largely ignores the geese off-shore. Still, within a few moments, her presence frightens them off  -- though not very far.

The idea is that the geese will keep being pushed around the lake, get annoyed at all the harassment, and they'll take off and go some place else, within a few weeks or a few months, depending on how many of them there are. Ideally, that would be to some natural habitat, like a wetlands or woodland pond. 

Graziano said he drove flocks of geese out of corporate campuses in north Jersey, into a nearby swamp. But where would they go from Prospect Park?"

"I don’t know. New York being as built up as it is, that’s a hard question to answer," he said.

In the past, they’ve mostly gone to nearby Green-Wood Cemetery, a half-mile away. Green-Wood has its own harassment efforts to get rid of geese, too. There’s talk of coordinating with Prospect Park, to get the birds out of the whole area, but no concrete plans yet.

Emily Lloyd, the head of the Prospect Parks Alliance, said purging geese from one part of Brooklyn just to see them go some place else won't necessarily spare them.

"If everyone who has a significant population of non-migrating geese that are close enough to the airport to be a threat – if they all take actions like this, over time, they’ll just get chased farther and farther away from the airport," Lloyd says.

Currently, there are about 33 Canada geese in Prospect Park, many fewer than last year, but it's difficult to say how much of that drop is due to last year's culling. Officials would like to get the flock down to about a dozen birds -- though they don't know how low the number would have to be for the USDA to spare Prospect Park.

USDA officials did not return calls seeking comment.