BRENTWOOD, N.H. (AP) – At the Rockingham County farm, a flock of 40 Canada geese is picking at a lush field of clover. It’s September, but these birds have no intention of flying south for the winter.

Canada geese are admired as harbingers of autumn for their V-shaped migrations south. But growing numbers of them, including an estimated 35,000 in New Hampshire, no longer migrate and are anything but admired.

“When you have 50 to 100 birds outside a residential property, it’s too many,” said Ed Robinson, a Fish and Game Department biologist.

The resident geese are accustomed to living near people, being fed by them and bothering them. They honk, terrify small children and exasperate farmers, golfers and park managers by gobbling up grass, leaving only droppings.

“They start honking at 4 o’clock in the morning. They honk all day long. They get on the lawn and they poop so much – I mean they poop like dogs – and after a week it stinks real bad,” said Ronald Dzuineski, 63.

Like a crazy man’

Dzuineski said geese are fond of a pond about 100 yards from his log home in Pittsburg. They’re less fond of the retiree’s shock-and-awe techniques.

“I run down there like a crazy man, try to spook ’em, get ’em to fly, but they’re just nasty animals. They’ll come after you,” he said.

Or, he tosses firecrackers from his front porch – “Just the little two-inch drops.”

Geese mate for life and return to the same place every year to nest, so the key is preventing them from breeding.

“If I let them breed they would become residents,” Dzuineski said. “Then I’d end up with a small herd.”

Those who’ve tried it say keeping geese away is a challenge.

Not dogs nor coyote replicas nor firecrackers nor even acting crazy will permanently repel the stubborn fowl. At best, they push a flock onto someone else’s land.

Migratory birds are federally protected, but there are exceptions for controlling problem populations. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service gives permits for rounding up geese, destroying their eggs and other tactics.

The three northern New England states let hunters shoot Canada geese during monthlong hunting seasons in September. The New Hampshire limit is five per day, and hunters get 1,200 to 1,500 each year.

“It’s the only tool we have,” said Daniel Madden, 50, of Keene, an avid hunter for 35 years. “There’s really nothing else that we can do to humanely control the population.”

This week Peter Bilodeau, 55, will hunt along the Connecticut River. The Berlin man said he’s often bagged 40 birds in a month when he’s started early in the season. A few years ago, at the request of an acquaintance, he thinned a flock on Lake Umbagog, where some children were suffering from swimmer’s itch, a skin rash produced by a parasite carried by waterfowl.

Resident geese are a human creation. Their population was supplemented by relocation programs and encouraged by people who feed and shelter them, so they no longer follow their natural cycle of nesting in Canada and migrating with the seasons.

“Because they’ve been subsidized by humans they’ve become very, very successful,” said Marsha Barden, a biologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services.

Thirty-five years ago, there were a quarter-million resident geese in the United States. Today there are more than 3 million. “It’s exploded. Absolutely exploded,” said Barden. “Every year we get people who call and they say, well three years ago we had six, and then we had about 15 and now we’ve got 30.”

USDA officials in New Hampshire have a permit to round up Canada geese. Barden said the agency is considering grabbing 100 during their flightless season, in June and July, having them slaughtered and butchered, and sending the breast meat to soup kitchens.

A similar program has reduced Virginia’s resident Canada goose population by half in eight years. In Virginia, local USDA officials have permits to round up as many as 3,000 geese a year and send the meat to food banks, said Martin Lowney, the state’s director of USDA Wildlife Services.

“We see this as, we could catch the geese and put them in a landfill, which would be a waste of a food resource,” said Lowney, or, “is there something positive we can do with the geese?”

AP-ES-09-18-05 1222EDT