Oregon Public Broadcasting

For years, residents in Bend have complained about the mess Canada Geese create in the city's parks. Last summer, the Bend Park and Recreation District made headlines when it euthanized more than 100 geese there. Some in town applauded the move. Others were outraged. This year the Park District is continuing efforts to scare off the geese in the hope that might avoid another goose kill.

David Nogueras / OPB

Canada Geese in Bend's Drake Park.

Paul Stell is the Natural Resource Manager for the Bend Park and Recreation District. Stell is the point man in what actually is a real "wild goose chase."

"Canada Geese are literally iconic to the city of Bend and the Mirror Pond experience and we will always have geese here. We'd just like to have less of them," Stell said.

The district, he explains, has employed a number of methods to chase off the geese. They've had people chase them with noisemakers. They've shot them with paintball guns. They've even tried using what're essentially scare crows for geese.

"We had some coyote cutouts that we put on a metal stands that. We didn't have any luck with those at all and then somebody stole them all."

Stell says the most success has come with man's best friend.

Lee Jorgenson: "My name's Lee and this is my dog Sophie."

Jorgenson is one of 20 volunteers who regularly patrol Bend’s Drake Park on the lookout for geese. He and his dog Sophie come down here three nights a week. Sophie is a five year old mix breed who looks a little bit like a fox. And Jorgenson says she just loves to chase geese.

Bend requires all dogs to be kept on-leash. But a special exception has been made for these volunteer dogs as long as they wear a special bandana around their collars.

As we walk along the river, Sophie notices something stirring beneath the bushes. Not a goose, it turns out -- but a beaver. The beaver fearlessly stares down the dog before swimming away.

"We saw a raccoon down here the other night. We were chasing the raccoon down here the other night. We were chasing the geese and she was running around this bush real interested, I looked, peeked around the corner and he was looking up at us. So we backed off real quick," he said.

Jorgenson says she loves to chase. "She’s never caught a thing but she likes to chase," he said.

All volunteer goose-chasing dogs are required to go though testing by the city. A professional dog trainer checks to see if the dog is friendly and obedient. This year about half the applicants were screened out.

Jorgenson and Sophie made the cut and have been patrolling now for three weeks. I ask Jorgenson if he thinks their efforts are making a difference in keeping the geese away.

Jorgenson: "You know I don’t know some nights I see a lot and some nights it’s very few, but sometimes there like three there today and usually there’s twenty."

Natural Resource Manager Paul Stell says he's seen progress. But so far, they haven't been able to reduce the goose population to a level the district considers to be manageable.

Still, he believes the program has a bright future ahead of it. Paul Stell: "We're going to be doing this for a long, long time.

This isn't going to go away and we're just hoping for a management number where you know we don’t have to use any lethal control." That number is somewhere around 150 geese.

Stell says the Park District will be conducting a new count in the next few weeks to determine whether more geese will be euthanized this summer.