Spring is on its way to Coquitlam and so are the Canada geese.
And that has city staff looking to take a new approach with the iconic birds after last year's egg-addling project failed to reduce their numbers and nuisance.
Lanny Englund, the city of Coquitlam's forestry operations manager, told The Tri-City News this week that after last spring's egg-addling project at Como Lake Park, the number of geese in the park actually increased from 81 birds at the spring breeding peak to 193 by July.
Addling - a process in which goose eggs in the early days of development are shaken, stopping the embryo from developing further - didn't work at Como Lake because most of the resident birds weren't nesting there, Englund said.
"We only found two nests," Englund said. "The one nest we found was empty for whatever reason and the other one we found had 15 eggs and we were able to addle 10 of them. The other five were too far along so we couldn't."
Englund said the city's confusion over whether the birds were nesting at Como Lake was exacerbated by the presence of moulting geese, which, by shedding their feathers, resemble newborn goslings.
The $2,700 addling project began last April after residents complained to the city about aggressive geese in the park and goose feces littering the grass and polluting the lake.
Englund said city staff will meet in the coming weeks to discuss new ways of curbing the goose population around Como Lake in 2011.
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