Smart Goose Deterrent System | Hacker News Reader

Smart Goose Deterrent System

irowbot.duckdns.org

84 pointssurprisetalk43 comments

I live in a small town in the UK, and I was wondering if I could adapt this system to prevent a local goose from stealing our beautiful golden celebration bell every year? The goose is a menace! Last year he tied my son's shoelaces together and tore up my neighbor's garden!

It'll work right up until a second goose joins the fun.

(These are references to Untitled Goose Game)

I thought this was a system to thwart an army of smart geese created by centuries of interactions with humans. But instead it’s a smart system for dealing with regular geese. My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.

I’ll save your day :) In fact, these _are_ smart geese created by centuries of interaction with humans. Why do you think they prefer human-created environments given a choice?

My pet theory is that aliens will assume the geese are our gods given all the toil spent preparing food for them.

If they talk to the pigeons then we are in trouble.

Your day will brighten up again: it is both the geese _and_ the solution that are smart. From the article:

> Geese figure out each system's weakness and eventually have their way [...] To outsmart geese...

I missed that part but got the goose/not goose part.

This is going to turn into that engineer trying to keep squirrels off of his bird feeder. He progressively taught a squirrel to be more clever in the process.

To quote Harry Hill: “Remember, karate chop to the neck - if the geese ever invade again.”

I had a similar issue with geese on a patch of grass in front of the house where the kids played. Flocks of geese in the 10s would ruin it in half a day.

I found a 532nm green laser to be extremely effective. Let the dot approach them and shine near their feet for best effect. (Of course avoid the eyes and keep the laser power down so the reflection doesn’t harm them either!). It took some time to get into the flocks psyche. You had to get the entire group distress level to a certain level before they would take off and leave.

The next step I got to was building a turret for the pointer. Goose detection image recognition was underway to make the system autonomous but I haven’t been able to finish it and have moved in the mean time so it’s not likely I’ll finish it.

If anyone else wants to have a go at it let me know.

A beautiful coincidence this goose-deterrent article’s URL preview is just “duckdns.org” :)

I too found this highly amusing

Rivalry suspected.

The hand-hewn quality of this venture charms me. I can’t tell whether or not it’s a serious business, but it’s clearly borne of a lifetime’s frustration, and it reads with the catharsis of someone having “finally cracked the code.”

> How often do geese poop?

> Sources are all over the place on this. Some say as often as every 12 minutes. Some say as much as 2 pounds a day. Others suggest these numbers are inflated. One thing for sure, geese poop too often and too much.

Geese eat grass which is not very nutritious. Quantity has its qualities but it makes a lot of poop.

I had something similar but for urban foxes. I don't think they care so much about getting sprayed, but they more care about the sudden unexpected noise of the sprinkler abruptly kicking in and giving them a fright. Never seen a fox move so fast!

Brilliant! I used to work in a building where they would go through the front driveways and walkways on a routine basis, covering them with poo and creating a seriously hazardous situation!

coming soon to a dystopia near you:

smart homeless "detterrent" system. it uses a government database to determine net worth, if too poor for the neighboorhood the system activates sprinklers

Pretty sure I saw them just hosing down the sidewalks - and all the homeless people and their possessions - in Market Street in SF. No AI needed.

Given the IQ requirements for law enforcement, not much human intelligence required either.

That's already the premise of gated communities, now that gates can be remotely controlled.

For neighborhoods that don't like fences, calling the cops on "too poor looking to be from here" in the next best move, which to your point could be automated from camera subject detection.

This is a brilliant project. public buildings need a sentry turret airsoft solution for pigeons.

I worked at a place where there was a giant grass patch surrounded by 3 buildings. A guy came in once per week flying his hawks around which make an excellent deterrent.

That said, I need a pigeon deterrent for my patio.

I would pay for something that detects coyotes or hawks near my chicken coop.

I thought this was going to be about using smart geese as a deterrence, e.g. against burglars or obnoxious neighbors.

FWIW, as a mechanism for keeping the geese in check, I like it.

Hours of Untitled Goose Game had me actively rooting for the geese.

Link doesn't load for me.

duckdns.org is a dynamic DNS service used for servers that don't have a static IP. That is, this is being hosted out of someones house, and I wouldn't expect it to able to handle HN's load.

"If you've got a problem with Canada Gooses then you've got a problem with me and I suggest you let that one marinate!"

Now THIS should have been called Duck Duck Go.

We are building an AI tool that we've code-named goose and so uh this was super funny and timely :)

any AI deterrent system seems worthwhile though. how many more useless chatbots does the world really need. it's like candycrush clones.

"I don't want to get wet, I'll fly over here to the water."

Now replace geese with homeless or peasants, and we've reached our goals for 202X "future" dystopia life.

Nah. If the free-fire authorized guards are kept (mostly) human, it's a jobs program and a political wedge among the hoi polloi.

*utopia. fixed that for you

darn, I was really hoping the solution was building more habitat for them

Habitat is not the problem for many avian pests, that's the thing. Doves, geese, ducks - they all don't require much else than a food and a water source to thrive, and that is the problem.

With no predators in place to eat them - cats don't hunt anything larger than a dove and they prefer mice and smaller rats anyway, stray dogs get killed off, wolves are extinct and birds of prey don't like urban areas - there is no upper external boundary to control their population.

Meanwhile, food is plenty. Unlike rats and mice, people (particularly the elderly) willingly attract the birds, when they go and walk through a park they deposit bread, grains, dairy, whatever they have on hand. I mean, I get it, watching a flock of birds is among the most relaxing experiences in green-devoid urban areas there is. But from a higher up POV, it's actually endangering these rare green spots (all that bird poo can literally lead to a stagnant body of water "flipping" from oxygen starvation from all the decomposing poo), and people don't get it. On top of that people are just careless, they throw their trash wherever they want (and all kinds of pests can pick them up), authorities don't take care about installing bird/raccoon/bear proof bins... it's an utter madness.

And just shooting up larger gathering places isn't an answer either. The locals may protest (either due to misguided love for the birds or due to the noise), it may not be legal to shoot them up in the first place, you can't poison them off either because any kind of poison would contaminate the water, and in doubt you'll just have a bigger population the next year.

> authorities don't take care about installing bird/raccoon/bear proof bins

"There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists"

https://www.reddit.com/r/BrandNewSentence/comments/jx7w1z/th...

When migratory birds no longer migrate and thrive in one location, problems happen. https://www.historylink.org/File/9351

People really seem to like building goose habitats, i.e. small bodies of water surrounded by short grass. Many of them get upset when geese show up to those habitats though.

It's all fun and games until it gets your cox wet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com