The Sheep Meadow geese are almost history.
Credit the city’s own Goosebusters.
The Parks Department had considered air guns, a sonar-operated scarecrow, border collies and even Boomer, Parks Commissioner Henry Stern’s golden retriever.
But in the end, the department stuck with groundskeepers, who shooed the birds away by flailing their arms.
It worked.
Where there were many geese last week, now there are few.
“The invasion is down to a handful of strays,” Stern said. “We’ve had a lot of success.
“Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the meadow, it is.”
Last week, 200 Canada geese were fouling and feasting upon the newly seeded lawn of the 15-acre meadow, which is off-limits to people – but obviously not to geese – in the winter.
That’s for the birds, insisted Stern, who noted that each goose drops 2 pounds of doo a day.
Initially, the geese returned as soon as the groundskeepers left.
But eventually, the Goosebusters won. Most of the geese have flown the coop.
“The geese have dropped from several hundred to a dozen or so,” Stern said. “They used to be there on an hourly basis.
“The sky was darkened with clouds of geese, but now there are only a handful.”
The commissioner said the dozen or so birds appear every few hours, but are quickly shooed away by the ever-vigilant groundskeepers.
Since The Post first reported the goose invasion, parks officials have been hit with a flock of solutions from the public.
These include spreading Kool-Aid or grape juice on the grass. Apparently, geese don’t like the taste.
“We also got a fax from Long Island’s Goosebusters. They rent border collies,” Stern said.
“But our own men had the situation in hand.”
Stern said the department got a couple of postcards from goose-lovers, too.
“They felt the birds should be free to come and go as they pleased,” he said.
“But if [the] Sheep Meadow became the city’s goose capital, we’d lose it as a public recreation spot for humans.”