Representatives from Sechelt’s Blue Ocean Golf Club have asked Sechelt council to consider granting the club a licence to shoot geese on the course in order to deter the birds from congregating there.
“The only effective method of deterring the geese is an occasional cull,” said the club’s golf course superintendent, Tristan Tuplin, during the June 15 regular council meeting.
“I want to reiterate that we do not hunt the geese, but we just merely try to discourage them from coming to the golf course, which at times sometimes necessitates killing a goose.”
He said the golf club held a permit to discharge a firearm on the property since December of 2000, but that permit lapsed in 2015 and now a new permit is needed.
“In all the years that I’ve been there [15 years] I’ve never seen any safety concerns or heard any complaints of the actions of the permit,” Tuplin said.
He noted that before the club was allowed to discharge a firearm onsite, between 500 and 1,000 geese would land on the golf course at any given time.
“Within the first year or two [of having the permit] numbers went down to a manageable level,” Tuplin said.
He noted that currently the golf club’s using golf carts and dogs to scare away the problem birds, but the geese don’t go far and return to the greens and fairways as soon as the dogs or carts are gone.
Tuplin said that in addition to the birds themselves blocking the playing areas for golfers, the excrement they leave behind is a potential health hazard.
Mayor Bruce Milne told Tuplin that a draft report has been partially put together on the issue for council and it will come forward for a decision within the next month.
“My understanding is the draft report is sympathetic to your position and concerns and to the limited numbers of ways of culling geese,” Milne said.
However, he noted, it won’t be as simple as just granting a new permit to the golf club because the district has a bylaw about discharging firearms within Sechelt.
“There are some issues, just so council has a heads up, in terms of the fact that we’ve been granting an exception to a bylaw,” Milne said.
“You can’t pass a bylaw and then give an exemption, so we have to address this in a slightly different way when it comes forward.”
