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Europe|Finland’s Short, Precious Summers Are Plagued by Goose Poop
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/29/world/europe/helsinki-finland-goose-droppings.html
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Helsinki Dispatch
Finns trying to enjoy beaches and parks during their all-too-brief summers have been vexed by legions of geese — and their droppings. The smelly mess has resisted even the most innovative solutions.
By Amelia Nierenberg and Johanna Lemola
Johanna Lemola dodged geese, and their poop, while reporting in Helsinki, Finland, and Amelia Nierenberg spoke to geese experts from London.
July 29, 2025, 12:01 a.m. ET
Each summer, sun-starved Finns flock to Hietsu Beach, a sandy stretch in Helsinki, to exercise, splash and attempt to tan.
Amid a late July, record-breaking heat wave, a very different flock has also been stalking the surf around Finland’s capital: barnacle geese — white-faced, black-backed and ever-present. At night, they roost by the water’s edge. Come daytime, as people spread out their towels, they waddle away, leaving small mountains of excrement in their tracks.
“There can be a shocking amount of poop,” acknowledged Jukka Lundgren, the manager of Helsinki’s public beaches, who has spent 15 of his 18 years on the job trying to keep the sand from looking like a goose litter box.
Now, after Sisyphean summers facing down the fowl’s feces, he thinks that he just may have found a solution: a wheeled cage with a strong resemblance to an old-fashioned hand lawn mower that is meant to sift the dirtied sand and whisk up only the offending feces.
Video
The contraption may be Helsinki’s most innovative poop-fighting effort yet. It is being tested this summer on about half the city’s 25 public beaches. It was designed in-house by beach staff members, who drew inspiration from a public competition last year meant to crowdsource poop-scooping ideas.
