Anybody who's grown up on the schoolyards, soccer fields and golf courses around Long Island is overly acquainted with the, uhh, material left behind by flocks of Canadian geese. That doesn't make the situation at Sumpwams Creek Golf Course any easier to handle, as the nine-hole layout in Babylon, according to Newsday, is doing all it can to rid its greens of another unwelcome kind of green.
Wedged between residences, railroad tracks and Route 231 north of downtown Babylon, village-owned Sumpwams Creek (formally the E. Donald Conroy Golf Course at Sumpwams Creek) is as attractive to golfers for its quaint, low-key par-3s as it is to geese for its unfettered access to grass and ponds. Newsday's May 4 report said as many as 100 geese have congregated at once around the course's ponds in past summers.
Solutions to the problem are either temporary or too expensive for a course manned by only three staff members, or both:
The village has tried air horns and silhouettes of dogs and foxes to scare away the geese, none of which had a lasting effect. Specially trained border collies can be brought in on a consultancy basis, but [Deputy Mayor Kevin] Muldowney said they are pricey at $800 to $1,200 a month.
The latest attempt at eviction was last month and employed a remote-controlled, propeller-driven device called the Goosinator. Bright orange, with giant eyes and teeth painted on its foam body ’97 ’93a dragon-looking thing,’94 Muldowney said ’97 it roared across fairways and water hazards on a pair of lightweight skis.
It drove the geese away temporarily, Muldowney said, but officials didn’92t like the $3,500 purchase price. The Goosinator was returned.
’93We’92re back to the drawing board,’94 he said. — Nicholas Spangler, Newsday, 5/4/2016
For more on Sumpwams Creek, check out the course flyover.