Coyote decoys at Waterloo Park have gone missing

Plastic coyotes, set up around Waterloo Park to scare off geese, have now been missing for more than a month.

Officials with the City of Waterloo say all eight disappeared within weeks of making their debut.

The decoys were part of a pilot project to see how they would impact the birds who roam around the park.

The city said they received a lot of complaints about geese last year, specifically their droppings and aggressive behaviour.

The coyotes, a natural predator of the species, weren’t meant to rid the park of geese entirely. Rather, the goal was to try and keep them off the main paths.

"They disappeared just before gosling season; until then they seemed to be working but they weren't there long enough to know for sure," Stacey Abbott, manager of corporate communications for the City of Waterloo, said on Tuesday.

There’s currently no plan to replace them.

The city said they're working on a goose management strategy and they'll continue to clean up after the birds.

The coyotes, meanwhile, were never meant to be a permanent fixture in the park.

“We’ll probably move them away in the summer and maybe look at bringing them back in the fall,” Tom Margetts, the manager of park operations for the City of Waterloo, told CTV News in April.

Now that the coyotes have disappeared, it’s not clear if the program will return next year.

- With reporting from Spencer Turcotte