Deep Dive: How Stissing Lake Got Clean 

Jen Chase, director of the Pine Plains summer camp, is sitting at a picnic table at Stissing Lake Park watching the older kids play volleyball across the lawn. She’s happy. Even though they can’t access their phones until lunch, they’re fully engaged, spiking and laughing.  

Life at camp has not always been so happy. Canada geese loved the beach, with its easy access to land and water, so camp counselors would need to come in early each morning to clean up droppings. “No matter how hard the staff worked to keep it cleaned up, it was constant and tiring,” says Chase. “The geese were also aggressive. Sometimes they wouldn’t leave. When I would jog, they’d hiss at my dog.”  

The shallow beach water was fertile ground for fecal-derived bacteria. Chase recalls many summers in which the water quality at the lake failed the Dutchess County health department’s water testing program, so the beach was closed. No swimming. A sign would go up at the beach, on the town website and on Facebook.  

“The health department would retest for E. coli every three or four days, but typically, once you fail, you can be in a rut,” she says. “One summer, we had no swimming from late July till the end of camp in August. We follow their guidelines. Young kids often swim with their mouth open.” 

While the kids stayed healthy, Chase says they suffered when the beach was closed. “They can’t cool off, or play in the sand, or just have that experience with natural beauty.”  

Fortunately, those days appear to be over. Stissing Lake has been deemed safe for swimming for the last three years. No closings. A solution to a long-running problem appears to be at hand.  

Goose Sleuths  

Some people thought the water quality issue was due to improper septic systems, or fertilizer runoff, but eventually the town worked with the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) to do extensive testing at different areas on the lake. The conclusion: the culprit was Canada geese. “They’ve been a problem at the beach for decades,” says Darrah Cloud, former town supervisor.  

Geese overpopulation has been an issue for many years on the lake, and the town has tried many non-lethal methods over the years, including installing wooden cutouts in the threatening shape of coyotes. “We tried a bunch of different stuff,” recalls Town Board member Sarah Jones. “Didn’t do much.”  

Canada geese are beautiful birds, and they are protected under federal and state laws. But their size and abundance often make them a public health issue, especially the “resident” birds that don’t migrate and have no natural predators.  

“Resident birds nest in New York, and migratory birds nest outside the state, generally in Canada,” explains DEC wildlife biologist Nathan Ermer. The migratory birds, which may spend winters in Pine Plains but fly north to breed, aren’t a nuisance, and indeed, their overall population has been declining.  

Resident geese, by contrast, breed on site. “We used to have five or six [goose] families who were resident,” recalls Rachel Minkoff, former president of the Stissing Lake Association, which represents the 15 or so houses that abut Stissing Lake. “Each year they would have 10 or 12 kids each, so you could have 50 geese on the lake in the summer.” 

According to Ermer, the DEC has determined that a sustainable population of resident Canada geese in New York state is around 80,000. “Currently, we have about 365,000 resident Canada geese in New York, and numbers are increasing,” he says.  

Wild Goose Chase  

Once the DEC study identified geese as the cause of the water quality issue, recalls Jones, “we reached out to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and they recognized that we had a real problem.” In 2020, the town contracted with the USDA to start a goose-culling program the following year.  

Says Town Board member Matt Zick, who worked with Jones on the issue, “people were complaining that there were feces everywhere, and we realized that the best plan of action was to legally take the geese away and donate the meat to food banks.”  

Even though some people may balk at the idea of killing wildlife, there was no opposition, recalls Jones. “The USDA won’t go onto to anyone’s property without written permission, and some homeowners were against it, so they didn’t go onto their property,” she says.  

One lake over, the resident geese weren’t as much of a problem, except for a few near Lake Road, according to Twin Island Lake Assocation president Beth McLiverty. “We have a pair of nesting swans, and they’re very adamant that they don’t want geese – they would chase the geese all the way down the lake,” she says. Although several homeowners didn’t want to witness the program or give access to their property, she says, “we understood that Stissing had a problem and needed to do something about it.”  

“We were requested by the town to help address the Canada goose problem, to help reduce fecal dropping on the beach and play areas, and for water quality,” explains USDA wildlife biologist Kenneth Preusser, who has managed the program at Stissing Lake since 2021.  

One Canada goose produces about a pound of fecal matter per day, he explains. “That’s about 92 droppings. And they tend to loaf on the water’s edge, where people relax as well.” 

In April or May, Preusser “oils” goose eggs, applying a thin coating of corn oil that prevents oxygen from permeating the shell, effectively asphyxiating the embryos. And from June 15 to July 15, when adult birds are molting and flightless, “we capture them alive and they are brought to a licensed processing facility to be prepared for human consumption,” he says.  

Preusser works with a crew of about five on boats, and the geese are processed at a facility that yields one-pound packages of goose meat, which is then distributed to local food pantries. “We got a cooler’s worth one year,” says Nelson Zayas, co-founder of Willow Roots, the food pantry on North Main Street in Pine Plains. “They were 1-pound packages, two breasts. We gave them out in our pantry.”  

Over the three years of the program, Preusser estimates, his team has removed about 40 resident geese from the lake. The program does not target migratory geese, who are generally gone from local waters by April.  

A Lake for Swimming 

“The program was extremely successful, in my eyes,” says Lynne Franzone, president of the Antlers Club, a private homeowners association for the houses directly across from the beach. The club, which maintains its own beach area, didn’t have as much of a problem with the geese directly, and when they had water tested on their side, there wasn’t E. coli contamination.  

She credits that in part to allowing brush to grow down to the lakeside. “We used to mow it down,” she says. “But we stopped doing that so the geese wouldn’t come up on land. And we’d shoo them away, too. But the geese were really overwhelming, congregating in open areas like the town beach. It was disgusting. We’re giving the lake time to reconnect to its natural balance.”  

“Canada geese are magnificent animals to look at,” says USDA’s Preusser. “We’re not here to eradicate them from the landscape, but to manage them.” The program is open to renewal annually at the town’s discretion, and the only cost to the town is the meat processing fee, according to Zick; the USDA program itself is paid at the federal level.  

For Jen Chase and the children at the beach, the program has made a world of difference.  She looks over at the lake and gestures with an open hand. “It’s a unique, beautiful setting here. It behooves the town to keep it in as good a condition as we can.”  

Says Jones, “We have this incredible natural beauty that needs to be recognized and protected.”