Good morninag all! Thanks for all of the info! Bulldinkie- We have tried the swans, firecrackers, mylar balloons, fake swans that we laid on their sides, just to name a few! Nothing seems to get through to these guys to move along. Sadly, our two dogs, each a 220 lb. English Mastiff, are total porch dogs! LOL! They are big and lazy and have no interest in chasing anything!! But you may be onto something with a dog...Will really check that out. Oregon veg! I hit the jackpot with your reply!! I called a few of the agencies you suggested. A wealth of info! Here in Pittsburgh, there is controversey (sp) regarding the removal of the geese from local parks. So it was a really good idea for me to call those numbers before taking matters into my own hands. Here in Sw PA, you need a permit to even HARASS the geese! Because we have a farm with horses (and these geese are in the pasture), the Wildlife Game commission are coming out to give us a hand. After 3-4 years of this, this is a welcome relief. A few interesting facts...Do not bother chasing the geese in June and July becuase this is their molt and they have lost their flight feathers, so when we were chasing them, they would just kind of waddle away, and not do anything, but actually got used to our noises. Good to know, but we realized we wasted a lot of time! LOL! Thanks to all who answered. I am so happy I posted this question here. All of you who have the geese know how damaging and dirty these guys can be. Do you know they litter the land with approx. 3 lbs of droppings per day? On another note...I did call the USDA (one of the better Geese removal agencies)and asked if they thought the droppings on my pasture where my horses eat would potentially harm my animals. They said there is no documentation, but it is likely. What are your thoughts? Both children playing around it and horses possibly eating?

There are several posts in the pasture at the front of the house. After it rains, its not unusual to see a vulture on each post. A week or two ago turkey vultures were sitting on the posts and they had their wings open to dry out a bit. (I wish I had started playing with the camera then.) Although the posts are only about 5 feet high, the turkey vultures just dropped off of them, opened their wings, and took flight. I have noticed that the vultures have an easier time landing in the trees than the eagles. They just go in and land. The eagles drop their feet and then flap their wings as they drop hoping their talons come in contact with the branch.

I live in central Alabama, and we have both black and turkey vultures everywhere. I got a ton of great shots of both as they fly over the house very low and/or perch in the trees off the bluff. Our back yard terminates into the bluff. They're awesome, and gorgeous. One easy way to determine if it's a black or turkey vulture is the color, of course, but note that the wings of a turkey vulture has white across the entire wingspan, and the black vultures have the white feathers at the tips. Turkey vultures' brown feathers are similar to the color of a bald eagle's, and they tend to wobble when they soar. The pic below is of one who perched above our house, then flew to a tree on the bluff outside our back yard.

Within the past say 3 years I have turkey vultures spending the night in the huge cottonwood in the very back of my yard. They spend their nights in this neighborhood....sometimes at my house, some times at another house a block away. There is a huge group circling every night in the summer...like 20 or more birds. But I do have a picture where I counted about 40 birds in the tree one fall after the leaves were gone. I wonder when they will leave? ( I am in central Iowa) do they all migrate as a flock? One at a time? Where do they nest? And why do I never see a vulture eating any of the dozens of road kill deer in this area? I haven't seen a vulture on the ground in Iowa ever! Can anyone shed some light on these mysteries? Linda C