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CANADA GEESE - Public Nuisance ambience: Canada GeeseHeres a program from our archives.In 1954, Giant Canada Geese were declared extinct. Just over a decade later, the geese reappeared and since then their numbers have grown in the northern United States and Canada. But their survival is due in part to their success at living in urban areas, where the geese aren't always welcome visitors. I'm Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet.Whitford: Since they've expanded their range into the urban environment, they've been considered extreme nuisances in areas where they are very densely populated.Phillip Whitford is an associate Professor of Biology at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio.Whitford: Giant Canada geese love nothing more than very short, well manicured grass which has lots of fertilizer added to it and that's a golf green. That's the parks-- the places where they mow three times a week for the baseball diamonds, the football fields. And what makes the geese unpopular is that they convert that grass to small cigar shape droppings, the size of your little finger, at a rate of about eight droppings an hour. Goose feces are not regarded by most people as esthetically pleasing.If we need to reduce interaction between humans and the geese what we have to do is provide them a suitable area to feed other than the areas humans want to use. And that's primarily a matter of mowing less frequently, fertilizing less often on the areas that humans use and then creating an alternate area where the geese can be fed. Other than that, as long as we put ponds in our parks, and lakes but up against the edges of those parks, we're going to find geese in the same places we want to be and we're going to find that the sheer abundance of geese creates water quality problems and dropping problems. Weve been listening to a program from our archives. If you want to hear more, check out our podcast.Im Jim Metzner and this is thePulse of the Planet.