LYNN — The city of Lynn has been playing a game of “duck, duck, goose” with unwanted geese for quite some time.
While city officials have had enough of the overpopulated nuisances, some residents and city workers don’t seem to mind them.
“They don’t bother anybody around here,” said Leo Vasiliou, a resident near Lynn’s Magnolia Park for the last 30 years. “God put these creatures on Earth with a purpose and only he can take them away, not us.”
On the other hand, there is Ward 1 councilor Wayne Lozzi, who has spent the last decade trying to reduce the number of geese through a process called “egg addling.” According to Chief of Information for Mass Division of Wildlife’s Marion Larson, this particular technique means going into geese nests and coating their eggs in oil, which keeps oxygen from getting through to the shell, or even shaking the eggs in order to terminate the embryo development.
“As a councilor I heard complaints quite frequently about these birds ruining parks and it became frustrating,” said Lozzi.
Not everyone agrees that geese are a menace to the city’s parks. Lynn public worker Henry Tardiff has been cleaning up Lynn’s parks for the last two years and isn’t bothered by them.
“I work at all the parks in Lynn and I don’t really pay attention to them,” said Tardiff. “They never really get in my way because if I walk over to them they just take right off.”
In a later statement, Larson noted that “addling” is one of many techniques used in helping to reduce the number of geese in a city, but it depends on how easily attainable the geese nests are, and how populated with residents and buildings each city is. For Lynn, the best options seem to be chasing the geese off with hunting targets and hired dogs as well as the egg “addling.”
Lozzi has “addled” more than a hundred geese eggs with the most success being at Gannon Golf Course. “Three years ago Gannon had 300 or more geese on many of the course’s holes,” he said. “Today you might see 30 to 50 of them, proving the technique is successful wherever we can find the nests.”
William F. O’Shea III, a candidate for council in Ward 1, has been an active member of Gannon Golf Course for a number of years and he confirmed that in the last two years whenever he is golfing, the number of geese on the course has been between 50 to 60.
“I get to see them up close and they are wonderful birds, but getting 100 concentrated in an area is bad for the environment and the people,” said Lozzi. “We have to figure out the most humane ways to move them along and get the numbers reduced.”
