The geese left in mid-July, just a day after I had finally broken down and attached a "Please Don't Feed the Geese - Your Neighbor" sign to the tree closest to the road. Being able to walk around my own property these past couple of weeks without needing to keep an eye out either for the geese themselves or their droppings has been incredibly liberating. I'm not doing this again next year, that's for damn sure. The only question is how much it's going to cost.
While I haven't gotten a full quote from Geese Relief (which has an employee living in my neighborhood), they said they would need to bring their border collies 2x daily for up to three months next spring to keep the geese scared of taking up residence. The guy also blithely told me that while the goal is to prevent nesting, they'll also straight up destroy the eggs for us if they do lay any (which is a crime, technically, so I was surprised he just dropped that into the conversation). I'd already done some research into "addling" the eggs, which is considered a humane (and legal) means of population control, but it requires getting up close and personal with the parents, which I'm not really keen on. We can also apply "goose repellent" to the grass around the pond, which will make the grass gross-tasting for them I guess -- pretty sure our neighbors behind us with the fancy chemically-treated lawn had that on theirs, because I watched the geese and they never seemed to want eat their grass.
So that's one fun unexpected homeowner expense we need to budget for next spring! The other is also pond-related. I had a consultation with a pond and lake company to see what they would recommend and to get a sense of how much it will cost to eventually install a fountain. They suggested an environmentally-friendly herbicide for the floating green plants (duckweed and something else), but they also suggested making an effort to control or remove the phragmites australis, also known as the common reed, which - surprise! - is an aggressive and invasive plant that will crowd out all others and take over wetlands, plus contributing too much biomass to the water when it dies each year. The herbicide happens spring into summer and reed treatment happens in the autumn, but the state agency that authorizes the permits for doing this in wetlands is so backed up that they said there's really no point in trying this year; I can reach out in January and get the permit process started for next summer. A 1/2 HP or 3/4 HP foundation will run us about $1500, but the real expense will be the $3k to get the electrical line trenched from the house, which is more than 100 feet away. Long-term planning.
The good news is that our pond is pretty healthy even in its current state! I was worried the green surface of the duckweed was a real problem, but the guy told me that even the Branford Supply Ponds, which are much larger and stream-fed, have the same issue in the summer. Our pond actually connects to the Supply Ponds, as I learned after Elsa. It rained like 5" in a day or two, and the pond had massively overflowed into the lawn. Sean insisted it would go down on its own, but I (correctly) guessed that the grate covering the overflow pipe was completely clogged by dead reeds and aquatic weeds. I had to unclog it manually - not the first time I've done it, but definitely the first time that it was so flooded I was having a hard time figuring out where the grate even was, since the rock border of the pond was like four inches underwater! It was not a neat business, but once I managed to clear a bit of the grate, the strength of the suction of the amount of water wanting to move through was incredible! It would make a fierce tiny whirlpool or a minute or two before more debris would arrive to clog it up, meaning I needed to immediately clear it again. It took me an hour or so, but I felt very accomplished - especially once Joe beckoned me across the street to look at the stream separating his property from Paula's. It was rushing with all the water from our pond! Finally I understood that our overflow pipe doesn't go to the storm sewer in the street...it goes under the street and empties into that stream, which runs down to the Supply Ponds.
Ultimately I'm less worried about aesthetics than about keeping the pond functioning as a viable ecosystem. We have tons of frogs and dragonflies (which I have only recently learned are mosquito-eaters, which explains why we don't have a problem with them), a turtle population that keeps growing thanks to my neighbors' "donations" (one came just this morning!), plus the goldfish Tony tossed in, and lots and lots of birds, including my favorite, the elusive green heron. The pond guy complimented me on our "wildflower area," which to my surprise contains milkweed, the favored plant of monarch butterflies. I did own up that it wasn't exactly an intentional wildflower paradise; rather, the slope of the land over there was a little too steep for me to comfortably cut on the riding mower, and since we lack a push mower I just decided to "let the pond have it."
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