border collies are enlisted

[Richard L Whitman <rwhitman@usgs.gov>]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0607060315jul06,1,1523382.story

Here he comes to save the beach
In an effort to keep e coli counts from closing city beaches this summer,
border collies are enlisted to chase those dirty sea gulls
By Brendan McCarthy and James Janega
Tribune staff reporters

July 6, 2006

Like a furry rocket, Max the border collie streaked across Foster Avenue
Beach on Wednesday, a blur to the dozen or so beachgoers and a threat to
the nearest flock of sea gulls.  With a flurry of sand, fur and feathers,
the birds took wing--moved, but only briefly. Ten minutes later, most of
them were sitting on the beach again in another group.  The birds
would not
rest for long. The dog would be back.

In one of the more amusing spectacles of municipal governance, the City
of
Chicago has contracted dog handlers to apply one of the world's most
obsessive dog breeds to one of the city's most Sisyphean tasks.  The
hope
is to chase off the sea gulls, whose droppings are believed to contribute
to e coli counts closing beaches.  The job of chasing sea gulls will
be
played out every half hour, about four to six hours a day, seven days a
week for the next month.

Max was bred to do this work.  "They want to move something,
whether it's
kids on a soccer field or birds from a beach," said Susan Hagberg,
president and chief collie wrangler at La Grange-based Wild Goose Chase.
Elsewhere, lidded garbage cans, crisscrossing wires and nest deterrents
will be used with bird monitors as the city counts sea gull populations
on
its beaches and plots its next moves.

At the very least, the Chicago Park District figures, the city will have
an
accurate count of how many birds are stalking the Montrose, 63rd Street
and
Foster Avenue Beaches.  But after years of developing inanimate strategies
to make the beaches less comfortable to indolent water birds, there was
something deeply cathartic about watching a team of border collies charging
into a flock of sea gulls.  "It's great to see those dogs tear
across the
beach,"Park District Deputy Director for Natural Resources Ellen Sargent
said Wednesday after watching the action on television. The program is
costing the city about $6,000, she said.

In a sense, a great match-up is being played out for all of Chicago to
see:
one of North America's most pernicious avian scavengers, the ring-billed
gull, versus perhaps the world's most determined herding dog, the border
collie.
"This is the obsessive--compulsive breed in the herding group. They
love to
do their job over and over and over again," said Lisa Peterson, spokeswoman
for the American Kennel Club. "The gulls will get tired of it before
the
dog does."

A variety of dog bred for hundreds of years to herd sheep in the rugged
hinterlands between England and Scotland, the border collie has had
thousands of generations to perfect the art of gathering livestock--even
if
the livestock is birds or, for that matter, children, cars or Frisbees.
 In
that time, they and their canine grandfathers were selected not for looks
but purely to move groups of other animals. At the same time, they were
brought up to ignore hope of actually catching what they chase, said Linda
Koutsky, past corresponding secretary of the Border Collie Society of
America.

"Where other dogs were bred to catch a bird, collies don't need it,"
she
said. The chase is all they need. "If God were to design the perfect
canine
athlete, it would be the border collie."  The dog's single-minded
desire to
impress its human handlers has made it the dog of choice for fighting geese
from Southern California to New England. It has been used to chase off
sea
gulls in places such as a Pennsylvania naval air station and Southwest
Florida International Airport.

In Chicago, border collies from Wild Goose Chase were last used to run
off
Canada Geese at the McKinley Park lagoon in 2001. The work that fall kept
them from nesting in the rehabbed lagoon the next spring, Sargent said.
But the sea gulls are more tenacious. Beach authorities in the Chicago
area
have tried for years to encourage them to move on, using tactics ranging
from air cannons to--in one case in Waukegan--openly shooting the birds.
Still, the prospects of castaway popcorn, open garbage cans and other beach
treats have kept a steady population in the area.

In response, the Park District this year switched to trash containers with
lids at all city beaches. They've added bird netting at the North and
Foster Avenue fieldhouses to discourage gulls from nesting there. At the
63rd Street Beach, they've even strung a grid of shiny wire 10 feet in
the
air as a deterrent to swooping seabirds. Observers will monitor sea gull
populations throughout the summer at the Foster, Montrose, and North
Avenue, 57th and 63rd Street Beaches.

The ace up their sleeve has been Max and his canine colleagues--anticipated
to be so disruptive that the Park District promised local birdwatchers
they'd refrain from unleashing them until the last northbound migratory
birds passed through in late-June.  Even then, the pilot program involving
the collies is starting only at Foster Avenue, where there isn't an
adjacent natural area suitable to the city's more desirable avian visitors,
Sargent said.

And as steadfast as a border collie might be, the city expects it will
need
an array of efforts to dent the gull population. Officials know, of course,
that if the birds leave one beach, they are bound to head for another.
"You really can't just do one thing. You have to go at these birds
from a
lot of different angles," Sargent said.

On Wednesday, at least, the gulls seemed determined to hold out.  After
Max's first run, most had landed again. But Max, Hagberg, and the other
three collies on the beach weren't in any hurry. As the sparse beach crowd
watched, the dogs ran at gulls again 10 minutes later. And again, and
again.  "We gauge success over the course of time," Hagberg
said. "At the
end of round one, we won. We started out with 138 gulls. After we moved
them off, they came back within an hour. But there were only 50. We can
fight 50 all day."


bmccarthy@tribune.com

jjanega@tribune.com



Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune


 (Embedded image moved to file: pic03760.gif)

Attachment: pic03760.gif
Description: GIF image