Geese fear fake Fido in the field

Drivers passing Bishop Eustace on Route 70 in Pennsauken these days can glimpse the latest thing in scarecrow tech.

Canine cutouts.

A half-dozen black "dogs" have been scattered across the softball and baseball fields at the co-ed Catholic prep school in hopes of deterring Canada geese from dropping in.

In more ways than one.

"You don't want to be taking a groundball and have a big pile of goose droppings make the ball take a bad hop and affect the game," said Nick Italiano, spokesman for Bishop Eustace, which has 750 students.

Spelled foul or fowl, that ball's anything but fair.

Acquired from the Dog Gone Geese Co. of Ocean County, the collie-shaped silhouettes, made of thin corrugated plastic, are creased so that their tails and heads sway in the breeze and their googly eyes bobble around.

To keep the geese from catching on, the dogs are rotated to new positions.

Over the winter holidays, some scamp even gave the mutts Santa hats.

Yesterday morning, about 75 geese crowded the sunny west end of the fields as if held at bay by the plastic sentries.

But basepaths were covered with goose tracks, and frosty fingers of future fertilizer crunched underfoot.

Come spring, after the fields are cleaned, student volunteers will resume "walking" the dogs, carrying the virtual pets to new spots to further spook the geese.

Alligator heads in ponds. Grape extract to make lawns taste bad. Loudspeakers that blast the sound of distressed geese. Many are the ways that desperate people try to deter grass-grazing geese, said Dog Gone Geese owner Rusty Martensen.

But the dog cutouts ($250 for five collies or pointers, plus shipping and handling) do the trick if they're moved around regularly, he said.

Bishop Eustace has tried other methods, too.

Real dogs worked for a while, but they weren't around all day. Repellent chemicals got washed away by rain. Fake goose carcasses prompted too many calls from neighbors.

Recently, a passerby said she saw one brazen bird perched atop a fake Fido, amid a field of fellow geese - a surprise to Italiano, who says the dogs are working well.

Or at least they were working until the holiday break, when the students disappeared and the dogs were still for two weeks.

Maybe the birds caught on, he said.

Or maybe it was the Santa hats.