Geese won’t go away at Fairfield’s Bonnifield Lake

FAIRFIELD — The City of Fairfield has tried everything to stop geese from leaving a mess at the beach at Bonnifield Lake, but nothing seems to work.

Fairfield Parks Superintendent Pam Craff said that, after several years of experimenting with noise-making devices, a fence at the edge of the beach, and a wire around the lake, city officials are now at the point of realizing the geese just won’t go away.

Craff said the parks department has landed on the only solution that seems to have any effect, and that is to keep a couple of rakes at the beach, so that good Samaritan residents of Fairfield can collect the geese droppings and put them in the higher weeds.

“We’ve had this problem ever since the beach has been there,” Craff said. “The parks staff was going down there a lot at the beginning, but we got behind on everything else.”

Craff said that the fence that blocked geese from getting onto the beach seemed to be effective, but it required a person to put it out every night and take it down every morning. Craff said this worked for a while because the city relied on swimmers to do this who were regular users of the lake.

“The problem is that, if they missed a day, someone else had to put it up at night, and then the geese eventually found it,” she said.

Craff said the city tried bringing dogs to the lake to scare off the geese, firing guns that shot blanks, putting strobe lights on the beach, and even experimenting with a fake crocodile head in the water. After all that, the parks employees realized that there was no way around regular raking of the droppings.

  Buy Photo

Call Andy Hallman at 641-575-0135 or email him at andy.hallman@southeastiowaunion.com