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Barking dogs latest weapon in fight for clean beaches
By Brendan McCarthy and James Janega
Tribune staff reporters
Published July 5, 2006, 8:39 PM CDT
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.
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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{ndash}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."
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