Bird is in the air to take back the beach
Drones are being used, with great success, to drive away geese and gulls at Petrie Island, reports DAVID REEVELY.
Fed up with geese fouling the grass and water at its Petrie Island beaches, the Ottawa city government is calling in drone strikes.
It’s proving amazingly effective, said Orléans Coun. Bob Monette. The place used to be haunted by as many as 140 geese, which can eat several pounds of grass in a day and poop out nearly as much in waste.
“Now we’re down to anywhere from 15 to 20 on a daily basis,” Monette said. The weapon the city has deployed is a “hexacopter,” a remote-controlled chopper with rotors that can hover, soar, circle and — most importantly — scoot along just above the ground, scaring the bejesus out of dozing geese. It’s operated by contractor Steve Wambolt, a former IT worker who launched his own business after one too many layoffs.
“When he takes it out, they put their backs up straight and they’re watching,” Monette said. “When he starts it and it goes up off the ground, they sort of walk into a formation, and as soon as it starts moving, they all take off and they don’t come back until the next day.”
Wambolt starts buzzing the geese at about 4 a.m. The drone also works on seagulls, though they’re a bit braver and have to be harassed almost constantly to keep them away.
Both sorts of birds can be territorial and nasty to beachgoers. Their droppings also feed bacteria in the water, which can make swimming dangerous.
The idea is to teach the geese that Petrie Island is an unpleasant place for them so they’ll eventually find a new place to hang out entirely, Wambolt said.
“Now what our strategy is going forward is, instead of waiting for them to land on the beach and chase them off, we’re going to get there before they land. We’re hoping once they find the area inhospitable enough, they won’t come back,” he said. He has two employees and they also operate remote-controlled toy trucks on the ground, which are particularly good for keeping seagulls from landing.
They work six hours a day on the beach, Wambolt said, but it’s spread out across many hours.
They harass the birds for about three hours early in the morning, then retreat for maintenance and battery charging, and return for shorter periods later. Sometimes at 3 p.m., sometimes late at night. They’re still learning the birds’ habits and trying new ways to disrupt them.
“This is changing each day because I’m only three weeks into a three-month contract,” Wambolt said. The hours are tough but it’s a lot of fun to spend all day piloting remote-controlled toys, he said. “I’m in perma-hobby mode.”
Since Wambolt went to work at the end of July, Monette said, the east beach at Petrie Island that the geese favoured hasn’t had to be closed once.
Wambolt’s usual business is in aerial photography. He met Monette, his own councillor, to pitch his photo services for surveying city properties, and the goose-frightening sideline came about when Monette had a brainwave and asked how low the hexacopter can fly.
Geese have been a growing problem at Petrie Island. The long-term management plan for the area the city adopted in 2011 called them a pest species that’s “having an impact on the quality of the visitor experiences and is creating a potential health risk.” Because Petrie Island has sensitive wetlands, they’d need to be run off the beach as delicately as possible, the plan said, avoiding things like chemical repellents. Without recommending any particular thing, the plan talked about reducing the area’s yummy grass, planting other vegetation and building fences to make flying in and out harder, and exploring non-toxic chemical solutions like certain fertilizers whose smell really gets up their beaks.
A couple of years ago, the city started using a fish-based fertilizer on Petrie Island’s grass, one the geese didn’t like, but it didn’t take. “It seemed to work at the start but then it seemed like the geese got used to it,” Monette said.
The drone contract lasts from July to the end of October and it’s costing the city $30,000, money Monette considers well spent if it makes a popular beach safer and more pleasant.
The city spends about $75,000 a year on raptor assassins to keep the gull populations down at the Trail Road landfill, partly because those birds eat at the dump and then head to the Ottawa River to do some dumping of their own.