Geese Dispersal With Frigate

August 15, 2025

I have nothing against geese. But when the congregate on the lawn the leave quite a lot of, uh, fertilizer and it’s really a nasty mess. So I wanted to find a way to persuade them to not hang out on my lawn. Having set up Frigate in HASS to take actions when certain objects (e.g., humans) are detected during certain time periods (including sending a picture of the person on my Apple watch), I thought this might also be a good approach to sending geese packing.

I installed a Z-Wave connected outdoor smart outlet to provide power to a well pump that we use for irrigation (using lake water). This was easy to connect (no hub required) to HASS via the Z-Wave integration (requires a Z-Wave USB gateway/radio, see my hardware setup in a revious post).

I installed an Amcrest wifi cameras and set Frigate to detect “bird” objects. To avoid low (but non-zero) probability events that might damage the well pump, I connected a pressure sensor (that will screw into one of the ports of the well pump) to a D1 Mini ESP device to report the water pressure at the pump every 60s, letting HASS decide whether it’s operating safely (so it can automatically turn it off if not). In normal circumstances the pump runs at about 40psi, but if it loses its prime it will sputter down to 20psi or so, and if someone were to turn off all of the spigots it would shoot up to 90psi (though I have a relief valve, it might still be hard on the pump). I’m happy to say that the system detects geese reasonably well and turning on the sprinkler causes the geese to immediately decamp (at around 7s into this clip; the sprinkler is on the dock and not easy to see but the effect on the geese is obvious). But the camera is still pretty far from the lakefront so it does not detect them until they move up closer to the house (and thus have been there for a while). Next step will be to move the camera down to the dock.